Time Machine not making hourly backups on MacBook Pro

On my M1Max MacBook Pro running Tahoe 26.5.1 Time Machine has stopped making hourly backups. It is now 10:21 PM, and this is the current status:


Basically 12 hours ago was when the last backup completed. It was not one that had been triggered automatically, but I triggered it by selecting “Back Up Now” from the Time Machine menu in the menu bar.


I had removed this backup destination once before, when this happening, and re-added it. This fixed the problem for a few weeks, but then hourly backups stopped again. It was a couple of weeks, before I noticed. This was a time frame, during which no backups were made. A scary thought!


I will take that route again and see, what happens. Basically, however, I would like to understand what the root cause is.

MacBook Pro (M1 Max, 2021)

Posted on Jun 10, 2026 3:32 AM

Reply
2 replies

Jun 10, 2026 3:47 AM in response to D. Hoffmann

I know a few more Expert Contributors who maybe able to assist in your current setup


Me, I use the conventional method of External Drive directly connected to the computer


Backing up to Network Attached Storage (NAS)

The convenience of a wireless backup to a NAS device is appealing. Based on user feedback, however, we discourage people from relying on NAS devices for their primary backup for several reasons:


  • Write performance to a NAS device is typically, at best, comparable to writing to a USB 2.0 HDD
  • Performance of a NAS accessed via WiFi can be 10-100 times slower than the average locally-attached hard drive.
  • Periodically validating the integrity of data on a NAS device may be impractical due to network performance.
  • WiFi backups are only as reliable as the network connection and macOS's network filesystem client.
  • Filesystem transactions on a network filesystem incur a lot more overhead than filesystem transactions on a locally-attached filesystem, leading to very long backup windows when your data set has lots of files (e.g. > 250K files).


For primary backups, we recommend that you procure a USB or Thunderbolt hard drive and create a backup on that locally-attached disk.



Below links are intended to augment what TM Backup does 


https://bombich.com


How to schedule a backup


SafetyNet snapshots vs. Backup snapshots






Time Machine not making hourly backups on MacBook Pro

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