Time Machine cannot complete backup anymore, not in Extended (Journaled) format

Question

Level 1

10 points

Time Machine cannot complete backup anymore, not in Extended (Journaled) format

Have 2 MacBook Pros, one running Mojave, the other running Catalina which I upgraded about when it first was released. Both have been backing up successfully with Time machine. Now the Catalina Mac says it couldn't complete the backup because the backup disk is not in Extended (Journaled) format. It stopped working 3 days ago, it was quite happy to backup before that. Haven't done any updates for a while, the last was OS 10.15.2 on 12/13/19. So why now? According to Disk Utility the Time Machine is formatted to Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled). Like I said, the other Mac is backing up fine, and this one was until 3 days ago.

So what it the issue?

TIA

MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.15

Posted on Feb 11, 2020 10:16 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

362,023 points

Feb 11, 2020 1:23 PM in response to m_brando

Please report any and all error messages provided when Time Machine backups stopped working.

Are you using the same drive for both Time Machine backups? Is the drive actually formatted as Case-sensitive? If so, that is not proper for use with macOS. The Time Machine backup drive should be Case-insensitive, Mac OS Extended, (Journaled) using GUID partition scheme. In order to change from Case-sensitive you must re-partition and reformat the Time Machine backup drive.

Be sure to keep the Mojave and Catalina backups separate. They cannot be intermixed.

Reply

Answer 2

m_brando Author

Level 1

10 points

Feb 11, 2020 3:43 PM in response to Kappy

Well... so oddly enough it is working right now. I did connect to it with the AirPort Utility and it said there was a firmware update available so I updated it. Then I deselected and reselected "Enable File Sharing" (no reason, just thought I'd do it) and after restarting the Time Capsule I noticed that my Catalina Mac was doing its Time Machine backup.

There are actually 3 backups going on to the Time Capsule, my two and my partner's MacBook when he comes over. He is also running Mojave. So the Time Capsule has two backups with xxx.sparsebundle (Mojave) and one with xxx.backupbundle (Catalina)

Dunno. Didn't work for 3 days, now it's working.

Reply

Time Machine cannot complete backup anymore, not in Extended (Journaled) format

Similar questions