Hello,
I'm currently having a problem where Time Machine seems to "forget" the drive I have configured it to use. In other words, it reverts to "not configured" for no apparent reason. This happens with every drive I have tried using so far, including the Time Capsule I have been using for this purpose for a long time and a Synology disk station.
I'd appreciate any suggestions. Thanks!
Mac mini, macOS 13.4
Here is a list of common problems you might review:
Time Machine troubleshooting on Mac - Apple Support
I now ran the Time Machine Mechanic diagnostic app and noticed the following result, which occurs only on the Mini but not on the MB Air:
Running check on scheduling system (CTS and DAS).
DAS appears to be rescoring normally over the last 90 minutes.
Running CTS check next.
CTS has been told to run a backup in the last 90 minutes but failed to do so.
Consider restarting your Mac.
I haven't been able to find out if there is any way of accessing the relevant settings, be it through Terminal or any other method, though. I strongly suspect there may be a relation between this result and the issue I'm having.
Thanks, Randall. I had actually tried all of these approaches before, to no effect, unfortunately. I am currently creating an all-new backup for the Mini once again, though I'd be surprised if anything should have changed once it's done.
I also tried deleting the /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist file in order to essentially reset Time Machine. That doesn't seem to have had any effect either.
Oddly, the MB Air I have (also on the same version of Ventura) has no such issues whatsoever, so I continue to think there's something wrong deep down in some configuration file.
Edit: I also cleared the APFS snapshots, which doesn't seem to have affected the issue either.
I'd appreciate any other ideas anyone might have...
Also as an update following another attempt, the above problem also happens when using an USB drive connected directly to the Mini. I started a backup to that drive before going to bed and found that the Time Machine pane has reverted to the following unconfigured state over night. That is the same kind of behaviour I also witnessed in relation to the TC drives I had been using previously.
I currently have no further ideas I might try, aside from some kind of full reset of the Time Machine application - whatever I might have to do to perform that, such as deleting config files manually.
I'd be happy to entertain any further suggestions. Thanks!
I have this exact same issue running 13.4.1 on a 2018 Mac Mini that I just bought new last month. My backups seemed to be working fine until July 2nd and then suddenly stopped. I'm not sure what would have changed on that day to cause this but I cannot even get it to manually run a time machine backup. Super strange...
Time Machine keeps forgetting configured target drive
