You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Kevin Strong Author

Level 1

25 points

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

olliebolle

Level 1

20 points

Posted on Nov 9, 2021 3:08 PM

I had some chats and a call with Apple support today about this concern, because I need backups. I did several things qithout any success. They advised me to use the safe mode and doing a backup there.

That fixed the problem for me and the backup went through in safe mode. It took time, but time machine ran through.

After a regular reboot my time machine is running again like before. And the 104 error message (above) went away. Up to now I do not have any idea why this works, but some magic must be these days;-)

Safe mode:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262

View in context

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

Similar questions