Time Machine not working with Sonoma

I can say that TM under Sonoma for me was essentially useless. It would back up but take literally an entire day or more to complete incrementals. After getting nowhere and waiting forever for a fix I finally decided to delete the partitions on my external backup drive, reformatted as Mac OS Extended Journaled and then set up at a TM drive with encryption. The initial backup of about 1TB took around 6 hours. But incrementals now go quickly and TM seems to be back to running normally. Just my 2¢. Hope it's helpful.

Kelly Frame wrote:

I waited until version 14.1.2 of Sonoma before upgrading about a week ago, thinking that all the issues would be worked out by now. I have been successfully using a Synology network drive to do my Time Machine backups, but Time Machine on my system after the change to Sonoma was not able to connect to that backup. I erased the previous backup and started a new one under Somona. The initial backup ran successfully, but now it refuses to connect to the backup or to do any ongoing updates. I don't get an error message, it just says "Connecting to backup disk..." forever. Based on information that I found, I have disabled OSMessageTracer and UpdaterStartupUtility, but that doesn't seem to make any difference. Any other ideas?

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file a bug report /submit your Apple Feedback here: Product Feedback - Apple

current stable release of Sonoma including bug fixes, security updates is macOS 14.1.2

Keep your Mac up to date - Apple Support

I am having the same problem, even after upgrading to 14.2, which I think started with 14.1 or 14.1.1. In my case I am trying to back up a couple of MacBooks to a shared external drive connected to my Mac Studio.

I am having the same problem, even after upgrading to 14.2, which I think started with 14.1 or 14.1.1. In my case I am trying to back up a couple of MacBooks to a shared external drive connected to my Mac Studio.

Time Machine was certainly broken after Sonoma. I have relied on TM for such a long time, and bought a brand new M2 Mac, but it came with Ventura. Apple support recommended I upgrade to Sonoma, and I did, and in March 2024, had my first ever issue with Time Machine. Time machine would be laggard and hang and then eventually fail. I did not realized it identified the file it could not process, but then realized it was just a .png file I had copied into notes.

I went to 'finder' and deleted the .png file removing it from trash as well and then backed up successfully albeit slow.

I did a LOT of research / google etc and found was not alone. Having 2 Mac Air's M1 and M2, I did not update the M1 which was still running Ventura. I went and bought a new Hard Drive (LaCie Rugged) and formated that with APFS as the other was on Extended journal and ran 5 backups on that new drive. I then reformatted the Extended journal drive erasing and reformatting and adding to TM and then ran backups and they have been flawless.

I do belive that something in Sonoma IOS 14 croaked the Extended Journal file system making it slow and very troublesome. I now have 2 drives for each of my Mac Air's (M1 and M2) and all drives are formated with APFS (Apple file system).

If you are unsure how to delete and reformat to APFS (Apple File System) give apple support a call and they will assist.

Sonoma I think, has a lot of overhead, but a simple .PNG file should not prevent Time Machine from completing and i've used .PNG files for years in my "notes' when planning trips and copying screen shots of places, and all of a sudden Sonoma took away my confidence in Time Machine, which I've used as my 'life line'

But as I wrote this, I did upgrade my M1 to Sonoma 14.4.1 today 5/8/2024 and when running the 1st Time Machine backup on the reformatted drive which has several Ventura Backups, the 1st Sonoma 14.4.1 it seems all is well now with Time Machine.

I am however, disappointed that most of the Technicians at Apple were totally unaware of the Sonoma and Time Machine issues and there certainly are a lot of stories out there about people having issues.

Billg76