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Time Machine in Catalina breaking secondary backup disks

For years I've been backing up my mac to two separate hard drives in Time Machine. Until installing Catalina this worked great. About two months after installing Catalina the second drive in the list just died without warning - not the usual hard drive fail, this was some kind of unrecoverable hardware problem. I wrote it off to the drive being old, and got a new one. Now, a month later, the replacement drive (a sandisk extreme ssd, 2gb) has stopped working in Time Machine - the error is something about not being able to create the backup folder, or An error occurred while copying files. I've tried reformatting, and first aid, several times - there don't seem to be any problems with the drive according to Disk Utility. But each time I re-add it to Time Machine as the second drive, it throws the same error and stops working.

MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.13

Posted on Mar 25, 2020 9:15 PM

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Posted on Mar 30, 2020 8:25 PM

I think I discovered the underlying issue - the old hub I've been using for many years, while still working for most things, does not seem to like hard drives of whatever type attached to it. So now I have a much newer, smaller, usb C type one, connected directly to my macbook pro, and just my backup drives running through it, and everything seems to be fine. I hope this is a working long time fix!

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Mar 30, 2020 8:25 PM in response to sduck409

I think I discovered the underlying issue - the old hub I've been using for many years, while still working for most things, does not seem to like hard drives of whatever type attached to it. So now I have a much newer, smaller, usb C type one, connected directly to my macbook pro, and just my backup drives running through it, and everything seems to be fine. I hope this is a working long time fix!

Mar 25, 2020 9:35 PM in response to sduck409

Time Machine is seemingly half baked.

I consider her a fickile mistress; it is great when it works, not so much when it does not.


I certainly would not rely 100% on TM if you value your User data...




3-2-1 Backup Strategy: three copies of your data, two different methods, and one offsite.


Boot clone https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-10081

How to use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250

Use DiskUtility Restore feature https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/restore-a-disk-dskutl14062/mac

note: >System Preferences>Security & Privacy >Privacy>Full Disk Access

unlock the padlock, press the + button and add Disk Utility


Time Machine in Catalina breaking secondary backup disks

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