Time machine says backup delayed

<<. I have found nothing to indicate that any of the drives are faulty. >.

the steps you have taken so far are not adequate to ensure no Bad Blocks.

Disk Utility FirstAid/RepairDisk should rightly be named 'Repair Disk DIRECTORY'

It and its low-level Terminal command fsck do not read ANY blocks outside to the Directory area.

If your drive is a few years old, and has developed some Bad Blocks, it could be slowed by re-reading Bad Blocks, hoping for an error correction to yield good data. Worst case for ONE Bad Block on a rotating magnetic drive is a quarter MINUTE per block.

a SMART Utility that can read out the SMART details and show you the counters, such as DriveDX, can help you understand whether you have un-repaired "Pending Bad Blocks".

ERASE and start over repairs all Bad Blocks in most cases, unless the drive runs out if spare blocks.

Connect to the NAS with file sharing.

When looked at from the Mac with Finder, how is the space in the Mac Volume on the NAS?

On a NAS, the Mac backup volume is almost certainly a Mac Volume simulated inside a File (a Sparse Bundle Disk Image) That works fine as long as it does not exceed a certain size, then the image may have to be expanded to hold more stuff. That expansion process can take a while.

THIS MIGHT BE NEW INFORMATION. I have a military keyboard...it's not "disrespectful" or "shouting" but simply a keyboard that for other reasons always operates in all CAPs unless I go to settings and change it. Normally in my work I don't do that.

I have had the backup delayed problem for months and tried it on and off no change. I have verified the backup and had that complete successful without changing the outcome of my backup operations. I've wondered whether the files relocated by iCloud were the ones referred to in the comments.

With so much located on the cloud drive, it stands to reason that iCloud might be updating one or more files practically all the time.

so I went to this screen and noticed that the top 3 times has clouds next them and showed me I think they are located on iCloud drive. the "desktop" items with 17gb includes most of my drive.

So I clicked the various clouds and it began to download these items to my drive. As it is shown now, they are completely downloaded and for the first time in several month my time machine backup (to my time capsule) works as it always has. Completed after a very long backup. about 1.41tb on the 2tb time capsule.

Now this may not apply to everyone having this issue. But it certainly wouldn't hurt to try downloading everything iCloud thanks is located in the cloud to see how that impacts this issue.

if you hold down Option while you click on the Time machine icon on the menubar, you may be offered "Verify Backups".

jevanswa wrote:

Regarding "backup delayed" on Sonoma I just discovered that in fact it was not delayed. All my attempts were met with "backup delayed" but it appears that in reality it completed the backup each time...

...so for your system, the truth was "message delayed" or message lingered for a long time after it was no longer applicable.

I turned off the iCloud Drive/Photos nonsense and my stuck backup was resumed upon clicking "Backup Now".

what is the message of backup status, EXACTLY?

could it be telling you that your BOOT drive is out of space? in needs some space to 'stage' the list of files that make up the backup.

Poking around at internet postings, the most frequent reason cited for "backup delayed" seems to be a dodgy connection to the backup drive.

Could your NAS or you connection to your NAS be overwhelmed by other data, or a develop a dodgy connection?

Files can be un-available if your Mac went to sleep, or if you have engaged storing/sync-ing files on iCloud. The Master copies are then on iCloud, and the copies on your Mac may be removed whenever disk space gets tight. These files will be delivered from the cloud to your Mac 'when demanded' but it will take some time for them to arrive.

Optimize storage space on your Mac - Apple Support

DropBox, BackBlaze, OneDrive and others may have similar features, if you have engaged them.

Hello -- I've just joined the community.. I'll try to keep this brief.

I have three USB drives I use for backup - let's call them D1, D2 and D3.

With D1 and D2 I get the "Backup delayed" message. What's more the TM menu top lines say that my previous backup was to D3, many days ago.

Grant says the cause could be a dodgy connection to the backup drive. I've now tried backing up again to D1, then D2, using different USBA-USBC connectors in each case. Same result.

When I drag to the "Backup Delayed.." TM menu item, I'm told TM couldn't complete the backup to D3. As if it had been trying to..

Grant also pointed out that if you hold down Option while you click on the Time machine icon on the menubar, "Backup Now" changes to "Verify Backups". I hadn't known that! When I tried "Verify Backups" TM told me it was verifying the backup to D2, the drive I'd just backed up.

Which looked promising - it's verifying D2, not D3.

And when it finished, reported the correct time I'd backed up D2.

So that's good. BUT the TM menu still says that my most recent backup was to D3, many days ago.

Bottom line: TM seems to be backing up perfectly, but its messages are misbehaving. I can live with that till Apple fixes it.

Following up my post of 16 November:

I'm running Sonoma 14.1 on an M1 MacBook Air.

A discovery! When I backup to one of my USB drives, get the Backup Delayed message, the first line beneath the TimeMachine icon still says, as before, that the last backup was (a) to a different drive and (b) on 22 October.

BUT when I go down the menu and choose OPEN TIME MACHINE SETTINGS.., one of the icons has beside it the name of the drive I've just backed up to, and the correct date and time the backup was completed.

So I won't worry any more. (Though I wish Apple'd fix this minor bug.)

If and when I buy a new drive (or reformat this one), I'll be interested to see whether TM's first-line message is still wrong, but it isn't a big deal.

I can confirm this is a UI issue - I also have Sonoma 14.1.1 ad I see "Backup Delayed" after my first backup in a long time.

But if I select "Open Time Machine Settings..." I can see the issue is with another of my TM disks and the last backup completed successfully.

Regarding "backup delayed" on Sonoma I just discovered that in fact it was not delayed. All my attempts were met with "backup delayed" but it appears that in reality it completed the backup each time...