Time Machine has stopped backing up to my external drives

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Time Machine has stopped backing up to my external drives

Why does my TM backup suddenly only backup my Desktop? I had TM in automatic mode and I have missed 6 months or so of my data backups - NOT GOOD!

I have 9 volumes attached via thunderbolt and 1.6 TB of data to protect so my data is very exposed at the moment.

My Mac mini is at Monterey 12.2.1 and I am able to see and read/write on all my volumes from the Mac so something must be amiss between TM and the external hard drive enclosure. Perhaps the drivers in the enclosure are no longer supported by the TM application. The enclosure is a Quad X and supports 4 APFS formatted drives. My TM drive is a 6TB APFS drive. It's strange that my Mac has no problem seeing the external drives but TM doesn't recognize them anymore. It's been fine for several years.

I'm going to try backing up to a different drive plugged into a Sabrent HD interface that allows drives to be plugged into it (very handy). I took the precaution of adding another TM drive and backing up to both to test this setup. I will also call QuadX and see what they say. The only way to have multiple volumes is to use some kind of enclosure.

If my experiment works out I will switch to the Sabrent external interface for TM which is connected via USB 3.0 I may have to retire the QuadX. Too bad because the QUADX uses thunderbolt. I welcome any thoughts. Thanks.

Mac mini, macOS 12.2

Posted on Sep 9, 2022 6:01 AM

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Answer 1

pughimag2 Author

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47 points

Sep 9, 2022 8:54 AM in response to pughimag2

I'll update my own post here. The Sabrent approach had the same problem although the good news is that the data is backed up but not visible in the restore screen of TM on both drive enclosures. Only the boot drive desktop is visible in the restore screen of the TM application in both cases.

I see there is an upgrade available for the Monterey OS so I'm going to do that first and keep researching the problem. I will return.

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Answer 2

pughimag2 Author

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47 points

Sep 11, 2022 4:54 AM in response to pughimag2

An update. I've been reading many posts that say that the upgrade to Monterey was coincident with strange behaviors of TM. Also an Apple support post that said that the format of the backups on TM prior to Monterey was different to the needs of Monterey so the old backups would not work. I therefore backed up everything using "Super Duper" to another drive and used Disk Utility to erase the TM drive then allocated the drive to TM once again. I still have the problem. After I backed up the Macintosh HD and another volume on the newly formatted disk (case sensitive APFS) the right amount of data was backed up but it is not visible from "Enter Time Machine", only the Mac HD is visible. I can search for the missing volume and TM will show me the volume in a strange format. The display is not the usual simple TM display, it's like a finder window. When I search for the volume I backed up I get the following format: volume name@snap-12345. When I double-click this I see the data on the volume. I deleted a single file on the source volume and then tried to restore it from the backed-up data but TM would not let me do it. "Restore" button was grayed out. I'm starting to run out of ideas.

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Answer 3

pughimag2 Author

Level 1

47 points

Sep 11, 2022 8:38 AM in response to pughimag2

OK, I feel somewhat foolish now although I don't think I've ever restored data from Time Machine before. I just remember that the interface was quite different from the current version. TM used to display all the volumes and let me navigate to the file's location. I have to select the location of the file/folder/volume/drive that's missing from my desktop and then "Enter Time Machine" which will bring up the backup history of that item. Select the backup that contains the missing file and click on "Restore". It works! Time to get a full backup going! I'm starting to feel my age (Retired). Here's a link that I found helpful:

Restore items backed up with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support

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Time Machine has stopped backing up to my external drives

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