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
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 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
Unless you choose to do a work-around as others have above, the only other option is to wait for the software change promised to several of us by different Apple reps. The 4th beta for Catalina 10.15.2 was just released. The Apple rep I've worked with told me to contact him if I had an emergency need and he'd walk me through a temporary solution. (I haven't had the need--YET). To do that, however, you need to contact Apple, get a case number, etc.
IWearBananaPants wrote:
Have you had any luck with support today? I've got the same issue and I'm about to open a ticket but I suspect this isn't the sort of thing any agent will be able to troubleshoot over the phone. Looking at some of the beta discussions on the dev forums it seems like this was a known issue that Apple apparently decided not to address before rolling out Catalina.
I will either be speaking to Support on Wednesday or Friday (not been told yet). I had no window even for myself today.
The agent was able to troubleshoot over the phone, though we soon migrated to an upper tier of agent liaising directly with engineering. I do suggest you open a ticket, please, simply because there is strength in numbers.
We've done a lot of screenshot and file uploading and guided work while screen sharing.
This is important, but not yet urgent. If I need to revert to backups I will be guided with tmutil which I am not competent to use unguided. Backups are proceeding, so I am choosing not to be unduly concerned
MikCas wrote:
The problem is not really there. Namely if you wait until all old baking cups are read in, you can scroll back in your TM.
It is also possible to access all TM backups of your "backup bundle" via Finder.
After you've called on the time machine, the "backup bundle" can be seen as a disk. This disk will be visible on your "Disk Utility". Now you can indicate with your mouse that you want to open this disk in Finder.
I adore the autocorrect to Baking Cups!
I have waited as you suggest, I'm afraid [somewhere that was redacted] froze over before anything happened, except on the days when it all worked like it is supposed to
The backup run failed silently at the end of the preparation phase. The disk unmounted at approximately that time. Enter Time Machine gave me a screen that was 'waiting' and it waited until the end of my patience. I'm reaching the conclusion that it is a mounting problem, and one that has appeared since Catalina. After all, it all worked in Mojave
I have forced the disk to mount through finder with smb://[local ip address] can see it in Finder and and am watching a new backup in prepare mode.
Prepare mode has ended and it is backing up x MB of y MB and calculating time remaining
So it seems my thoughts on something altering in the detection and mounting of the disk may be on the correct track. It seems very odd that I need to force mount the disk
More as I learn more
Came from the other shorter thread on this. Been on with Apple at least half dozen times for various issues since Catalina including this TM issue.
Eventually got a clean install of Cat but all attempts to restore from TM backup or migrate data with migration assistant failed repeatedly.
Yesterday while on phone with Apple we renamed the backupbundle file to sparsebundle and instantly had access in Finder to all old TM backups from Mojave. I spent some time before work dragging files over, I am fairly sure I got them all but wanted to double check, but when I got home from work 8 hours later, TM backups had disappeared from finder again. I have not made an attempt to do a new TM backup from Catalina yet, and the file name has not changed, still iMac.sparsebundle.
I do not have any third party NAS stuff, using Apple Time Capsule.
Tried some of the above but Disk Utility does not show the Time Capsule external HD even though I have show all devices checked.
Hoping for some assistance.
Also in Finder prefs I have all things checked including Bonjour computers.
What a strange issue.
Hans Bakken
Thanks Lurk and all above for your suggestions.
All of a sudden now the sparsebundle and TM backups are now visible in Disk Util.
Backups were transiently able to be seen in TM but when I closed TM and opened again, they were inaccessible again!
In Disk Util, I am able to right click the TM backup > show in finder and get to the files!
I did not do anything except plug CAT6A cable from iMac to LAN port on Time Capsule.
Although I have had the cable plugged in most of the time for the last 10 days while I was desperately trying to get any OS reinstalled after failed Catalina upgrade.
So it's not just a matter of cable vs wireless NAS communication.
Clearly the issue is not resolved, I will NOT be surprised when I get home from work if sparsebundle and TM backups have again disappeared from Disk Util, which is currently the ONLY way I can see them.
In answer to the Time Capsule, yes it is Apple branded combination NAS and wireless router. I have had them since 2009 with no issues, but as you know they were no longer manufactured after spring 2018 so eventually I will have to get something else.
After painstakingly confirming that I have all the my desired old data dragged to my new clean Catalina install I will likely try a new TM backup, any thoughts?
Not sure if it will do incremental backup or a new full backup in this case, anyone tried this?
Hans Bakken
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)
ApteryxMAC wrote:
I had the same issue and I solved the same way.
My sparsebundle is on an external drive and I erased the TM backup from my time capsule. After Catalina created its own new backup, everything works fine.
That is not a solution. That is the creation of a new backup. You have chosen to lose you old backups.
The problem only exists when the Mac cannot see the external drive. The entire issue is in connecting the external drive (of whatever out) reliably
What are your settings for your NAS with the TM option. This is very important for your problem.
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.
Hi Mr Lurkums. OK. Yes, I panicked and started again! After upgrading my Time Machine backup, it was sitting there for hours and hours with just a 'preparing for backup' message. Meanwhile my whole laptop was unusable. Couldn't exit the time machine, couldn't even bring up the Force Quit window. So crashed restarted it and it then said I had 2 days of backups again but no mention of my last 12 months worth - they had since disappeared from both the summary and the recovery windows. I need 100% reliability in backups so did a quick erase of the time machine disk because it was by now showing as full but didn't seem to be erasing the oldest stuff. And having a mix of backups across 2 Operating System versions worried me a bit. It is possible the system was doing something amazing in the background but no indication to the user that it was. So I panicked and did a quick erase and started a new full backup. 6 hours later all is working fine again, albeit with only a couple of days of backups, but ones I have faith in being able to retrieve. Best of luck with your discussions with Apple... My next problem is what to do about the Reminder system - it has upgraded OK though somewhat scarily and reappeared betweeen my iMac and iPhone but my iPad won't upgrade software to OS13 so in the upgrade I've lost the wonderful integration between all my devices that originally sold me on Apple.
I got my weekly call from Apple last Friday. The engineers told him they're aware of the problem and "investigating" which I'm told is AppleSpeak for a solution will be coming out in the form of an update, a Knowledge-based topic, or both and he'll contact me when that's out. I don't have an immediate need to find a lost email nor do I have the skills to perform some of the gyrations others have done so for right now I've elected to wait it out. But I'd encourage others to identify this problem to Apple. As someone previously posted, there's strength in numbers.
Time Machine Backups are present but missing
