Entering Time Machine I see backups only back as far as 10/10/2019, 19:12. It won't allow a screenshot so I had to take a photo
TM Preferences shows
I Imagine that equates to 19:12
Terminal shows differently:
Unless I'm being particularly dense, TM can't see the backups that tmutil can see. So I am bewildered.
I'm not sure what data Catalina arrived, but I upgraded on pretty much that day
MacBook Pro with Touch Bar
Much work with my NAS vendor has led to cautious optimism. We checked many things. They have been told my by many users that there is a problem and are taking matters very seriously. It may have come down to setting the Bonjour area correctly. This is my NAS user interface. Your NAS will be different, but equivalent settings are likely to be present
These are my two key settings. The lower one was not ticked. Obviously I am using SMB.
Now it is ticked. A simple test showed that this is likely to solve the problem. I will let my standard NAS closedown and restart process happen overnight, and brief you here in the morning with success or failure. A brief test just now leaves me cautiously optimistic
Much work with my NAS vendor has led to cautious optimism. We checked many things. They have been told my by many users that there is a problem and are taking matters very seriously. It may have come down to setting the Bonjour area correctly. This is my NAS user interface. Your NAS will be different, but equivalent settings are likely to be present
These are my two key settings. The lower one was not ticked. Obviously I am using SMB.
Now it is ticked. A simple test showed that this is likely to solve the problem. I will let my standard NAS closedown and restart process happen overnight, and brief you here in the morning with success or failure. A brief test just now leaves me cautiously optimistic
I've had a similar TM issue which I mentioned in another thread you've also commented on, Missing Time Machine backups post Catalina Upgrade
After upgrading to Catalina I never checked to see if TM had changed to a sparsebundle but initially I could see/access my files through TM and then after a new backup had completed, I just couldn't. Opened the disc through finder and all was there and available in a backupdb but not through TM
DiskUtility showing on my system as it always did in Mojave
My TM is Mac OS Extended (Journaled)?
This discussion thread is relevant.
Under support guidance I discovered that my backup file was renamed, perhaps by Catalina, not by me, to .backupbundle
We have gone through some steps suggested any engineering to return it to sparse bundle. Those are not yet complete so briefing folk is not yet useful. We have another call scheduled tomorrow to follow up further
I promised you an update. This is what we did, but it has not resulted in success, so is here for your interest. If you are engaged in a support call on this topic it may save time if you make your support agent aware of this thread, since they do not normally look here.
The designed workaround was as follows:
The next step was to Enter Time Machine. It was expected that all backups would be seen on the scrolling field of dated Finders. This was not to be. This is why I am documenting the process so that you do not need to follow it, except maybe out of intellectual curiosity.
Next, we watched the filename of [name].sparsebundle and started a backup manually. After looking for and finding the disk, soon after the phase preparing backup started, the file was auto-renamed to [name].backupbundle which was not wholly unexpected.
TM completed the backup, which has proved to be in incremental backup.
I am thus confident my backups are safe. I am also confident that I can use, under guidance, the tmutil command in Terminal to recover any files I may need to recover in the future.
It seems likely that this issue will pass to Engineering since Apple sees TM as fundamental to its product offering.
Note: Even with the file named [name].sparsebundle Enter Time Machine failed to show the backups
More briefing after the next support call, probably later today
I'm in conversation with Apple Support about this. I backup to a NAS, and there appears to be something awry with my sparse bundle. The icon shows up thus:
A real sparse bundle should show up thus:
The senior support gentleman has seen this once before. I've been able to brief him that it shows the backup sparsebundle the same incorrect icon on a second machine and that both are on Catalina. He feels, but is not certain, that this is coincident with the upgrade to Catalina.
An interesting further symptom is that the two machines I have access to are attempting 100% backups each time (as far as I can tell)
I think the most useful thing folk might do is contact Apple Support over this issue in order to allow them to gather as much information as possible to narrow this down
Now I am really confused, and will present this confusion during my support call to Apple
Compare this picture with the one in my original post:
Look at the date and time on the right hand side. I can now go back past Catalina install date. But I have done nothing except that documented in this thread! Time has elapsed.
I also had a weirdness yesterday. I Plugged in my external drive with my photos library on it. TM had just performed an incremental backup of my machine itself, and I expected it to perform an incremental then, including my photos library (yes, I make sure it's included in the backup).
It suggested it was backing up some 36GB (Yay! Incremental, probably) and then backup up over 142GB. I left it running overnight. I woke up to this message this morning:
I suspect this failed during the cleaning up phase because tmutil shows this:
/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/[machine name redacted]/2019-10-14-003027
and TM Preferences shows this:
So all agrees with that hypothesis. My conjecture is that the next backup will cleanup the backup drive first, and then gather the files it needs to back up. But will it be incremental or full? Its eating up my backup drive, that I know.
Oh. It's gone again!
Suddenly, after being happy I am back to perplexed. How can what was there now not be there?
So I am speaking to Support again.
The shot below is of the identical MBP we have at home. Nothing has been done to this machine. It is here as a control. The date in the shot is the date it was upgraded to Catalina and ran its first backup
Today I am back to not being able to see 100% of my backups:
I have a weird clue, though. Five backups in there is one with no heading. Here it is nearer the front
It's as if there is a gap in the backups, a gap that isn't present. I can't land on the blank one. It comes between 10:55 and 13:04
So what does tmutil show?
To me it looks as if it is present, just invisible and timestamped 2019-10-15-121155
I did try waiting. I waited on this screen for over an hour
What it seems to show is that TM is erratic beyond belief right now. This is my oldest (today) TM Visible backup and is invisible. tmutil shows older backups
No news from Support today because they have no news to give me
I have a bit of a clue. When TM is backing up, then I can Enter Time Machine and see all backups because TM mounts the backup drive
When the drive is not mounted Enter Time Machine does not seem to mount the disk. It seems to rely on some sort of cached set of backups on the MBP
I'm starting to come to a conclusion, based on observation. Remember, I use a NAS drive.
It seems as if I can see all backups when the NAS drive has the .backupbundle that it contains mounted. And mounting it seems unusual. When I observe the status via Disk Utility the Time Machine backup flashes in and out during the 'preparing backup' phase.
From the next two screenshots, taken one immediately after the other you can see that it can see, at present the mounting status
A few minutes later, while TM is still preparing the backup the volume mounts fully and stays mounted:
Since the preparing backup phase happens after it has finished searching for the disk I conclude that 'something' is awry in this area. I never watched it via Disk Utility under Mojave, though, so I can't give a fair comparison, and this may be a mistaken assumption.
I did some extra research on NAS as a Time Machine backup home. The NAS vendor had told me to migrate to afp:// some time ago. This was successful at eliminating the then problems I had with connection. But afp is deprecated. smb is the current thinking. I am running currently, and for these screenshots with smb.
Waiting for that back to finish I watched it reach the end of the preparing backup phase and then fail with no error message. The disk unmounted at around that point. I can't be sure which.
Trying Enter TM at that point gave me a screen that hung for ever awaiting the mounting of the drive. I abandoned it. But this gives me a clue that the location of the problem may be imperfect backup mounting.
scottfromniceville wrote:
Data point: I have this problem using an external drive (G-Technology) that is not hooked up to the network.
I'm gladdened to hear others are having some success. Unready to take on this more sophisticated solutions until I'm completely out of other options.
Does Disk Utility see your G Drive when you plug it in?
It sees my NAS thus:
When it sees it like that it can back up to it and it can see all my backups back to the first
In my case, after performing a clean Catalina install, TM backups were accessible in TM and Finder just like with Mojave.
I had failed multiple attempts to restore to Mojave from latest TM backup and Data Migration also failed multiple times.
So I dragged the files I wanted to the new OS and then started a new TM backup over WiFi. After over a day, the backup was not nearly complete so I interrupted it.
Then saw that some of the file folders I dragged contained no data.
I was on with Apple senior advisor, we changed the extension of the backup file from backupbundle to sparsebundle, and immediately could see the old backups in Finder (did not try TM).
I then started dragging files again, this time by individual folder, to make sure it was coming across successfully. I had to go to work before I finished and when I came back 8 hours later, I could no longer see the backups in Finder, but nothing else had changed, the file ext was still sparsebundle and I had not made another attempt at a new TM backup.
My NAS is an Apple 3TB Time Capsule and looks like this in finder (after changing to sparsebundle extension).
Using the advice from one of you I am able to access the data through Disk Util as such and clicking "Show in Finder"
Then I am able to see all the old data and drag and drop what I want, looks like this to root directory, you can see the backup dates as well -
Now I am currently doing this with LAN cable to the NAS LAN port, but I am not sure it makes any difference except the cable is faster. At this point I am certain that I have brought forward all the data that I wanted to save, and it has all come across successfully, no empty folder surprises!
Even though the data is accessible using the above method, TM does NOT work. It shows a snapshot from today on the front panel, and all the dates are visible on the right side of the screen, but you cannot make them open, I have even waited in TM app for 20 minutes and it makes no difference.
You cannot screenshot in TM so can't show you, but all the date lines are there but when I hover, they turn red and nothing happens when I click. And there is only one finder panel, you cannot go backwards.
This evening I will initiate a TM backup (through the LAN cable) and see what things look like in the morning. At this point I have everything I want from old data so nothing to lose.
I also understand that the new backup will again change the name of the backup file to backupbundle.
Hope this helps if you just want your data back.
I have not tried any of this over WiFi either so results may vary if you are not using direct LAN cable to your external drive.
Hans
Just checking to see how your Seagate drive is connected to your Mac, looks like hard wired, not NAS, correct?
If so, use About This Mac > System Report button, then select "Storage" in sidebar.
The file system has to be Journaled HFS+
and the partition type GPT (GUID Partition Table)
I will guess that these are correct or you should not have been able to initiate a backup.
But this is the same problem I have.
I am using NAS (Apple Time Capsule) although I currently have the Mac connected to the TC via LAN cable.
TM now appears to occasionally "work" (randomly).
This AM I disconnected and reconnected my TM backup disk in finder, as it had disappeared from Disk Util window. (see pics below)
TM backups were then available again in Finder, was able to use the default app to open the backups file (see below) after which TM seemed to work for the first time since all this began with my failed Catalina upgrade attempt over 2 weeks ago.
However, I tried to delete an old backup in TM and it did not work, locked up TM although I was able to recover with ESC at which time I saw popup on the desktop that said some files could not be deleted as I "did not have permission or they were in a locked volume" - which makes no sense.
Also, when I attempted a new TM backup last night, TM said it ad completed a "Verification" of TM backups, and that it needed to delete all my old backups and start again to improve reliability.
So there are still some strange issues.
I am awaiting arrival of a new external HDD I ordered yesterday, once I receive it I will copy the old sparsebundle file (for posterity I guess) and then do a new backup, which will wipe out my old stuff (not a problem since I have all the data I wanted from my old OS) and will have made an archive copy of the sparsebundle. I'll probably keep that old data around for a while and then retask the disc for some other use like PS4 or something, at this point it's probably overkill but I already have the disk coming so whatever.
Will post back after attempting new "clean" TM backup likely on Thursday.
Sorry for rambling see pics below for how I am able to mount the TM backups and access old data through Finder (the other way is in my pics above through Disk Util)
Update-
Copied old .sparsebundle backups from Mojave to another external drive just in case.
Then new TM backup to my NAS (Apple 3TB Time Capsule) - TM said that it had competed a Verification of my TM backup, and in order to "improve reliability" TM must delete all old data and create new backup, so I said OK.
Backup through LAN cable from iMac to LAN port on Time Capsule took around 20 hours for 1.3 TB, after about 4 hours preparing backup.
During the 4 hour backup preparation time I saw the space available on the 3TB NAS go from 900 GB to full 3TB so TM must have been deleting old data, NOT sure why it took so long to to this. It would have been faster to use AirPort Util to delete disk and then create new TM backup disk in TM App. Perhaps it was performing some repair, but did not indicate so.
In any case, backup was successful, and TM now seems to be working just fine. As expected, the old backups are gone (I still have my legacy copy of my old .sparsbundle file on a separate external drive (although doubt I will keep it around for very long now since all data is across to Catalina install).
Also am able to see the new backup in Finder (.backupbundle file), the option to mount disk is no longer there, so cannot use this to get to individual files.
However, I can also see the backup in Disk Util (interestingly enough it is called an Apple sparse bundle disk image here) and can still open Time Machine Backups in finder this way to get to individual files.
So my problem appears to be solved. I am not very tech savvy but appears that the old TM architecture is not stable in Catalina even though the data is there.
My best advice, if you have all your data, let Catalina TM do a new backup. It will likely take a while, use cable if possible (LAN, T3 or USB-C)
If you don't have all your data, use one of the methods I posted above to access the old backup file (changing the extension to .sparsebundle if necessary) and find what you need and copy the files to your new OS, then do a new TM backup in Catalina.
In my case with NAS being Apple perhaps this may not work for those with third party NAS.
Time Machine Backups are present but missing
