time machine will not back up using big sur

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Level 1

16 points

time machine will not back up using big sur

Anyone having problems with TM back up after installing big sur. It took me 2 days to finally get a back up. It kept crashing. First aid could not fix it so what I had to do was go into recovery mode every time and was able to fix my external hard drive and reboot and start the back up, it would go so far and crashed again. I had to keep doing this for 2 days to finally got a full backup. But now it keep crashing again on tells me TM can not back up. Anyone else having this issue? Any recommendations on how to solve this? Or should I just turn off TM?

Posted on Nov 14, 2020 1:06 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

AntBee

Level 1

133 points

Nov 16, 2020 12:25 PM in response to starfire03

Time Machine backups under Big Sur, now require your TM drive to be formatted as APFS. I have seen other people suggest getting another hard drive for TM backups, or saving your last OS' TM backup, if necessary to revert back to your old OS, and then erasing and formatting the drive to APFS. The latter is what I intend to do once I decide to do the update.

Please see this article:What's new in the updates for macOS Big Sur - Apple Support

I hope this helps.

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Answer 2

starfire03 Author

Level 1

16 points

Nov 16, 2020 11:47 AM in response to Mysstic

I have tried 2 different brands of external hard drives and still the same. If i click on first aid and try to repair them. It tells me it can not. The only way i can run first aid on them is in recovery mode and it still does the same thing. I am going to reinstall the big sur and see if that helps.

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Answer 3

Bsaw67

Level 1

10 points

Nov 16, 2020 12:29 PM in response to starfire03

I had a similar problem with Catilina, am still on it. I could not back up any e-mails like I use too. Checked with Apple Care and they said TM no longer provides e-mail back up on latest releases including Big Sur since e-mail's are now kept on your provider servers.

I can still backup Documents, Files though.

Bill

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Answer 4

starfire03 Author

Level 1

16 points

Nov 16, 2020 5:49 PM in response to AntBee

For some reason it was the WD external hard drive. I found out my issue was solved on Seagate. I had my photos stored on there so after i took them off and I was able to reformat to APFS and the back up went very smooth.

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Answer 5

homer 69

Level 1

18 points

Jan 7, 2021 2:41 PM in response to starfire03

I reformatted 2 different brands of ssd backup disks to APFS. the problem is that once you add them to timemachine its charges it to APFS case sensitive .I think this is the problem. I have been in touch with Apple and they acknowledged there is a problem but still working on a fix until today. the funny thing is that the same disk with the same formatting backed up 330 gb on my 2013 Mac with Big Sur, in 40min!!! maybe different firmware.

but still no news from Apple and still no backup!

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Answer 6

Mysstic

Level 1

8 points

Nov 16, 2020 11:13 AM in response to starfire03

I just downloaded Big Sur and my time machine is doing the exact thing and not able to perform back up.

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Answer 7

starfire03 Author

Level 1

16 points

Nov 16, 2020 1:26 PM in response to AntBee

I did format it to APFS and that it still wont back up. I just reinstalled Big sur again and this time when it booted up it wanted me to eject that external hard drive but not the other

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