Level 1

22 points

Monterey Time Machine not working

Immediately after upgrading from Big Sur to Monterey on my M1 MacBook Air, most of my Time Machine backups stopped working. I have one backup going to a network drive, the other four go to locally connected USB drives that are rotated between locations. Only a single one of the USB connected drives continued to work all the others show the same symptoms:

The backup starts and then appears to work fine (giving me number of bytes backed up and a time estimate of what's left), and it gets almost done, according to the progress bar, and then it just stops. No errors are displayed, it just stops. When I open the time machine control panel it just shows the last backup as the one immediately before the Monterey upgrade.

I took one of the offending drives and erased it using the disk utility, then removed and re-added it as a Time Machine volume. Time machine picked up the drive and began backing up to it and appeared to back up nearly the entire machine (~600GB worth). When it was almost done (just a few minutes left, according to the progress bar), it just stopped. Relaunching the backup on that drive will cause it to back up a gigabyte or so and then it just stops when almost done.

Any assistance would be appreciated as only one backup is happening. Thanks

MacBook Air (2020 or later)

Posted on Oct 28, 2021 12:52 PM

Top-ranking reply

tundraespresso

Level 1

8 points

Posted on Jan 5, 2022 9:02 PM

The Apple support person got back to me today. Engineering requested that I run the command:

tmutil addexclusion ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy*

and try backing up again. After running that command, the next backup succeeded. If I removed the exclusion (tmutil removeexclusion), the next backup failed; if I re-added it, the next backup succeeded. No other changes were needed.

Presumably the engineers were basing the exclusion on these errors in my Time Machine log, which other folks have also seen:

2022-01-05 20:52:41.604577-0700 localhost backupd[540]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:FileProtection] Failed to acquire device lock assertion for /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/[computername]/2022-01-05-205219/Macintosh HD - Data/Users/[username]/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems/Data/Documents error: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=22 "Invalid argument"

All of the errors like this in my log referenced items that fit the pattern “~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy*”. For those who want a workaround to get TM to mostly work, searching the Time Machine log entries for those “Failed to acquire device lock assertion” errors (or any other errors that appear to happen when backups fail), and tailoring your TM exclusions to what you find, might help. (Again, this echoes what other folks have said.) For those who aren't helped by this workaround, consider logging your case with Apple.

Meanwhile, at least there’s evidence that Apple engineering is working on it, even if they’re not currently very far ahead of us.

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131 replies

Nov 1, 2021 10:00 AM in response to imediayala

I used the diak utility to wipe out an external Timemachine and reformat it in apfs. Now it is loading. Let’s see. I read Momty needs an apfs disk.

sermain

Level 1

8 points

Nov 5, 2021 7:58 AM in response to mats198

I used this https://bombich.com

Free for a month and works well.

Nov 7, 2021 9:36 AM in response to rmartin7me

Good, so this clarifies it just happens on M1 chip based Macs.

Again, when TM while on safe mode does work, still waiting on a new Monterey release that addresses this issue though.

SidChat96

Level 1

123 points

Nov 12, 2021 11:37 AM in response to sermain

It will be corrected if someone informs Apple about this.

SidChat96

Level 1

123 points

Nov 24, 2021 12:42 AM in response to dahosepipe

Where can you get the error logs?

sermain

Level 1

8 points

Dec 14, 2021 3:55 AM in response to mrwrighty

Just uploaded Monterey 12.10. The Time Machine still doesn't work. Have decided to forget it and do my own backups by simply copying & pasting and using Carbon Copy Cloner.

Oct 29, 2021 8:41 AM in response to high_voltage

I'm having the same issue and would like to add my anecdote.

I'm on a fresh install of Monterey and I attempted to use a newly formatted external drive for Time Machine. When the backup begins, there will be a progress bar and it will appear to be working normally. Even after it reaches 100% and appears to have completed, the Time Machine menu will still imply that there has been no completed backup as evidenced by two things:

The menu will still say "Latest Backup: None" and also when directly opening the Time Machine drive in Finder, there are no files at all. Odd too is that the actual space for the backup is being taken up on the drive, but as stated there are no files actually copied or accessible on the Time Machine drive after it appears to have completed.

Oct 30, 2021 2:02 PM in response to high_voltage

I also created a new Time Machine volume (Time Machine-2) in order to have 2 Time Machine volumes. I used diskutil from terminal (see command below) since I wanted to limited the maximum size of the Time Machine volume (container is shared with other APFS volumes). I presume that required the terminal command needs to be run from an admin account.

This configuration is working fine on my Mac mini (2018). Each Time Machine volume is stored on its own external SSD (500GB Samsung T5).

- Pie Lover

simima

Level 1

62 points

Oct 30, 2021 2:29 PM in response to BlueberryLover

Timemachine stuck at "waiting for the first backup to complete" forever. Apple, what did you do... is it soooo difficult to release Mac OS versions that work? What is even more intriguing - both Timemachine and Photos did work with Big Sur. Now they're both broken.

simima

Level 1

62 points

Oct 31, 2021 11:54 AM in response to high_voltage

It may be that only external HDD (or SSD) connected via USB are concerned by this bug. I'm doing a TM backup onto my NAS, which works fine (thanks heaven). With two external drives ((one HDD and one SSD) I've tried all that I could find in the forum, but to no avail. "Waiting to complete the first backup" on both drives, forever. So, I'm at the end of my wisdom - it doesn't work anymore.

Really interesting that Apple issues a major OS release with such significant bugs.

Nov 1, 2021 5:45 AM in response to imediayala

I have 2 Samsung 500GB T5 SSDs, each with a Time Machine volume (used for backup of the system and user files). The first (TM1) was a holdover from Big Sur while the second (TM2) was created in Monterey (I used a Terminal command to create the TM2 volume). Both TM1 and TM2 seem to function normally with Time Machine on my Mac mini (2018) running Monterey.

- Pie Lover

mats198

Level 1

8 points

Nov 5, 2021 7:32 AM in response to high_voltage

No TM does not work with Monterey. I have tried 2 different SSD discs and the back up does not appear and when I do several backups the TM disc gets full and there is no backup made that I can use. I really hope my MacBook Pro and Macbook mini (both M1 chip) doesn't break now that I don't have any back up...

Nov 7, 2021 6:58 AM in response to high_voltage

I used MacOS Monterey on my old laptop, a 2019 MacBook Pro 16 with intel chip and time machine worked fine. I got the new 2021 MacBook Pro 16 with M1 chip and I have this same problem. I no longer have the 2019 laptop to compare.

jinet

Level 1

65 points

Nov 14, 2021 11:32 AM in response to Harry2047

Seems to work for some, not for others (not for me).

I have Monterey running TM flawlessly on an Intel iMac and it is failing every time on an M1Pro MBP14. Have erased the external drive repeatedly and tried different formats.

My machine as FileVault on; I want to use Encrypted and Case Sensitive APFS on the backup drive (5TB HDD). TM shouldn't be sensitive to any kind of formatting, correct? Is there a reason NOT to encrypt or use case-sensitive for the backup drive? (That would defeat the purpose of those settings.) (Failing = not showing backups; the disk storage indicates that they are there, just not displaying; the app TM either shows no change or is permanently trying to complete a backup.)

I did have success with a limited backup (exclusion of just a few files). It subsequently failed to repeat backup too.

I have spent hours with an Apple tech and we got nowhere so far.

I will eagerly wait a solution from this list if not from Apple in an upgrade that stabilizes their software.

jinet

Level 1

65 points

Nov 14, 2021 12:10 PM in response to Harry2047

I'm glad you got yours to work.

I've tried safe booting and running a TM backup. Didn't work.

I want FileVault on and need encryption on the external drive. So, very hard to compare apples (Apple?) and oranges (lemons?)

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Monterey Time Machine not working