Time Machine "Waiting to Compete First Backup" but looked like it did create the backup in ".inprogress" folder, and is running hourly and creating ".interrupted" folders

Time Machine keeps reporting “Waiting to Complete First Backup”, but keeps appearing to run hourly backups. There are a series of hourly backup folders with “.interrupted” extension on the external backup drive, and also an “.inprogress” folder, which does appear to contain a full backup.

This is on a brand new MacBook Pro 2021 I just got this week.

At first, when I moved the external USB connected Seagate backup drive from my old MacBook to my new one, and “inherited” the backup, everything was working fine.

Then after a while it started reporting that the oldest backup was always the same one from the night before.

I tried erasing the drive (including a double wipe), deleting the com.apple.TimeMachine.plist, rebooting and starting a fresh backup. Looked like it was running fine, first run took a few hours, but after appearing to finish in System Preferences it reports oldest backup is None and “Waiting to Complete First Backup” in the menu bar. But does keep running every hour, and in System Preferences there is a time for the Next backup which keeps advancing after each run.

I’m not sure, but the problem might have started after I did the software update to Monterey 12.0.1 from the factory installed 12.0.

Any suggestions to try much appreciated.

Posted on Oct 31, 2021 10:58 AM

Top-ranking reply

Kevin Strong Author

Level 1

31 points

Posted on Nov 2, 2021 2:26 PM

Managed to fix it myself. Elsewhere I found how to look at the Time Machine log file using the following in Terminal:

log show --style syslog --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --info > tmlog.txt

Opened tmlog.txt and found the reason for the failure on the last line:

Backup failed (104: BACKUP_DELAYED_UNFINISHED_PROTECTED_FILES)

Looking further up, found several files with the following error:

"Failed to acquire device lock assertion for........Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetPeople/Data/Library error: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=22 "Invalid argument""

(all the errors were with com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidget**** files)

Booted into Recovery Mode and ran Disk Utility. Ran First Aid on the startup disk volumes, containers & disk per this:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210898

I didn't notice Disk Utility reporting it fixed any problems. But after rebooting, the next time Time Machine ran it finally completed the first backup!! And has been running smoothly since.

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Time Machine "Waiting to Compete First Backup" but looked like it did create the backup in ".inprogress" folder, and is running hourly and creating ".interrupted" folders

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