M1 + Monterey Wont Backup. "Waiting to complete first backup"

Great!!

Me Thinks, that others may be able to also resolve this by setting up new user under Monterey than doing TM backup

using that user. I also had to use the new user after doing (pretty much) what you did.

I got there by accident. (See prior)

(Hopefully others won't have to do all the backup/restore)

Me also Thinks Apple want us to re-register owner id (with iCloud) under Monterey. Wish they would just say so!!

Took some time to figure this one out, but starting with Big Sur, the Sophos uninstaller leaves those extensions behind, and still running. They blame Apple, Apple probably blames Sophos, but anyway here's the solution:

https://community.sophos.com/intercept-x-endpoint/big-sur-eap/f/recommended-reads/124391/how-to-remove-system-extensions

Not being a software developer myself, I chose option #1, which involved reinstalling Sophos so that the extensions would appear and could then be dragged to the trash, then uninstalling Sophos again and restarting the computer. Then I ran Etrecheck again, searched for "Sophos," and it's finally gone.

To summarize: If you're running Big Sur or Monterey and wish to uninstall Sophos, make sure to follow step #1 in the link above and drag the two extension files to Trash first before running the Sophos uninstaller application. Whew! Now onto the next steps...

Just to clarify, the Seagate T7 2TB external drive is not the Time Machine drive. I use it only for music related applications and samples. Why all those snapshots are apparently on that data drive, I have no idea.

Time Machine runs on my Seagate 8TB hub external drive. Many users are reporting over on MacRumors that MacOS release 12.2 has fixed the Time Machine glitches, or at least some of them. I just updated my laptop to 12.2 and will let Time Machine do its thing overnight. With any luck, it will do a cleanup operation and get things back to normal. I'll report my findings here tomorrow.

This seems to be the case, that Time Machine never purges the space consumed by "Local Snapshots." What's really frustrating is looking at the list of folders for which there's no file size shown (as in the pic below) and seeing in Finder that the hard drive is 92% full.

Then Finder only shows the user created folders, not the "invisible Local Snapshots" written to the drive by Time Machine. I find it really crazy that one must use a third party disk utility such as Disk Analyzer to determine whether their external hard drive is actually full. In Finder, the drive has shown 1.83TB used for weeks now, so I don't see it changing anytime soon.

And all the Local Snapshots being on my external drive rather than the internal drive also makes no sense to me. I wonder if I unplugged all external drives and let Time Machine keep backing up, if that would force it to write the Local Snapshots to the internal drive? Or maybe it would "think" the data on all the external drives has been deleted and create some massive backup?

I have used Time Machine for nine years with my 2012 MacBook Pro and have never seen anything like this, so makes me think it might have something to do with the transition from Extended Journaled to APFS? I mentioned to a friend that my new Apple computer is driving me crazy, and he said: "Well, you can't blame the computer, it's doing exactly what humans instructed it to do, after all!" Fair point there, so hopefully the same humans can fix this issue.

FYI: Updated 12.1 to 12.2. I again ignored doing Safe Mode stuff but had to do first TM backup using my owners

user.

Also for kicks I did the following:

Here's the article from AppleInsider in case it helps anyone else:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/26/how-to-delete-time-machine-local-snapshots-in-macos

Backups are moving right along.

No, that doesn't work on my M1 Pro 16" MacBook Pro. Boot into safe mode, format the SSD (it is SanDisk Extreme Portable 2TB) and do full backup, still stuck at the "Waiting to complete first backup", even I waited overnight.

On the other hand, my another i9 16" MacBook Pro, also on Monterey 12.0.1, I did the same thing on the same SSD, Time Machine worked flawlessly.

FYI TM also works pretty flawlessly on my late-2014 Mac mini with my 12TB HDD on USB 3.0.

I strongly doubt it has something to do with how M1 handling USB drive.

Pretty frustrated by this TM bug and awaiting for the fix.

12.1 Broke Time Machine for me: In my earlier post, initiating Time Machine in Safe mode on Monetary 12.0.1 on my 2021 M1 MacBook Pro 16" allowed me to get Time Machine working normally. After upgrading to 12.1, Time Machine no longer works normally. Backups start normally, shows progress percentages, says it is finishing up but there is no new backup folder on the 2TB external Sandisk drive. The drive only shows the last backup prior to upgrading to 12.1. Time Machine also shows "Latest Backup...." as from prior to upgrading to 12.1. Tried in safe mode and that did not resolve the issue like previously. I do see that that the available space on the TM drive is shrinking so these ghost backups seem to be happening again.

I make a couple of test text files in the Documents folder and going into Time Machine, and going back in time does show the changes to this folder. I am also able to recover the test text files created and deleted after upgrading to 12.1.

This issue is quite disappointing for an upgrade that further broke this feature. This is why I prefer to skip several dot releases of new MacOS major versions. I had no choice with these new M1 MacBook Pros. I'd prefer not to downgrade to Big Sur, which is quite stable.

Many thanks for the suggestions, I have run Etrecheck and attached the report, looks like something keeps crashing with Sophos. I have read a few articles about whether antivirus protection is advisable for hardware running MacOS, and some said yes, but suggested running AVG or MalWareBytes to prevent malware/adware.

After turning off the hard drive and system sleep options, my offsite Carbon Copy Cloner backup completed successfully. The third external drive, which was about 1.2TB full, took a little over 16 hours to back up though.

I also excluded the backup drive from the Spotlight Search by dragging it to the Privacy List. The list remains blank after the drive was added, but the drive no longer shows up under "Locations" on the left side in Finder, so it must have worked. I have created a separate discussion post here regarding the Spotlight Search Privacy List, might be a bug or something.

Since I reformat the backup drives as APFS with GUID Partition, Disk Utility erases everything on the them, so there's no third party software installed. I still need to run a Time Machine backup to keep offsite, so will turn Sophos off before doing that, but wanted to leave it on for now so that the Etrecheck report would include any errors from it.

This is my new Samsung T7 2TB external SSD on acid. Been going crazy deleting and moving files since the new SSD was nearly full. Granted, as a Music Producer, I grab every free sample and plugin I can find, so I thought guilty as charged.

But after looking at the contents of the drive, things didn't add up. Turns out that over half of my 2 TB SSD is being consumed by something that we mere mortal computer users aren't privy to see. Disk Utility First Aid gave me a clue when I saw "Snapshot 14/14" being analyzed. Seems these are Time Machine files clogging up my Music SSD.

So although I had given up on getting Time Machine to work until Apple fixes the issue, my 2TB SSD is near capacity all of the time. I'm convinced that if I had nothing on this SSD, it would still be full of "inaccessible files." And ironically, this SSD is plugged directly into the laptop with the supplied USB C cable. My other 5,400rpm Seagate 5TB external drives connected to hubs don't seem to be affected.

For anyone who hasn't read everything I've gone through so far (and can't blame you), I was able to get a successful first Time Machine backup on my new MacBook Pro 14" M1 by running the backup in Safe Mode. It seemed to have been working fine since then, but now I realize that Time Machine is eating my hard drive for lunch. Any suggestions on how to remove these inaccessible Snapshot files?

May have hinted at this before. I don't believe apple "purge" data from drives but only internally mark the data areas as "deleted/available".

When the areas are requested for use the areas are "overwritten". Consequently no contraction and the entire disk

is shown to be in use.

Apple also seems to use the "largest available" space/disk to write local snaps. If the space on an attached disk is larger

then the space on your internal drive, that's where local snaps go.

No proof, but as an old systems programmer that's the way we did it.

The internal drive shows 1.65TB free of 2TB, and my external 2TB SSD had 1.27TB free before that was consumed by the Local Snapshots.

Since I keep all of the music production files on the external drive, the internal drive actually has more free space, so no idea there then. I suppose that I can cope with using Disk Space Analyzer to show me the true user data and available storage space on the drive, but it sure is an odd way to go about things, and the whole ordeal confused the heck out of me.

Just like the guy from that five year old post on the developer forum, I was trying so hard to delete and move data from my "full" drive, while TM was just filling all the freed up space with Local Snapshots. It has taken hours of research and using third party disk utilities to figure out what the heck was going on!

Well, at least this goes down in recorded history for other people who have the same issue. Perhaps someone will find all of this information helpful five years from now. ;)

Safe Mode startup is indeed a significant troubleshooting protocol for the foreseeable future. It makes all the "Cleaner" software utilities obsolete.

If your primary Apple ID user is the name of your computer than okay. If not, login with the computer name user id

(name used when you first setup your Mac).

Found a working solution here: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/434587/why-is-time-machine-stuck-on-waiting-to-complete-first-backup-after-upgrading

Adding to DonH229 I have NEW IMAC 24 Monterey 12.01 "Safe Boot" mode didn't help. Still seeing Oldest/Latest Backup:None.

Using Time Capsule Backup which I wiped to backup IMAC and MacBook Air Big Sur 11.6 Intel. My MB continues to take good Time Capsule Backups showing Oldest/Latest.

I also will take periodic CCC Backups until Apple get it's act together.

"If it ain't broke don't fix it"

P.S.

When I enter Time Machine I believe the backups are seen but I haven't tried to restore any files using them.