Time machine backup not running

Mark Sealey wrote:

The other odd thing here is that I did disable TM yesterday and tried running TimeMachineEditor; its backups scheduled for an Interval of 1 hour also failed!

Would you expect that if it uses core Apple TM calls?

I'm reasonably sure that if the builtin scheduler can't overcome whatever bug is causing this problem then neither can a third party add on. However, you might contact the developer & see what they have to say about it. It is possible that if this software runs tmutil using the "startbackup" verb without the auto flag in some mode to do the backup, it could work in that mode. That might be roughly equivalent to the GUI "Back Up Now" option, which works for most of us.

R C-R,

Thanks. I did just as you suggest… waiting to hear back from developers at TimeMachineEditor;

There's a very easy solution until Apple finally get around to fixing this. It sounds crazy, but it has worked on every machine I have tried so far.

Just add Airport Utility to your startup programs. As long as you keep it running in the dock, Time Machine works like a dream. Stop running Airport Utility and Time Machine barfs.

Apple are not the company they once were when it comes down to the "it just works" side of things and they pay far too little attention to major problems like this. When you think of the cash the company has on hand, spending some of fixing obvious software bugs like this one would make a great deal of sense. But anyway, give running Airport Utility a try!

Andrew, are you referring to the UPS problem we are all having and Time Machine not running unless we unplug our UPS USB cable from our desktops? If so, please confirm that this is a workaround to the UPS problem. Thank you.

@GreekGeek1157, @Andrew Herd - thanks for that!

I've actually opened a bug report with Apple too.

The physical configuration on top of and below an almost built-in desk with over 15 USB devices connected via two semi-concealed hubs virtually prevents me from connecting/disconnecting my UPS at every startup. So I feel my best plan is to keep playing my part in pushing Apple.

Sadly - as a 25-year Apple advocate and customer - I have to agree about the negative aspects of their changes in direction towards mass consumerism as opposed to outstanding OS technology.

Apple does know about the issue and is working on a fix. There was a workaround hack with terminal that's posted in this discussion, and I saw Linc Davis also showed you that option. If it's a necessity to have the UPS plugged in and you restart often, then you may want to try that out.

The UPS will continue to function without it being plugged into the computer. The only difference is that you can't set a shutdown time. The computer will just quit when the power goes to nothing. Otherwise if the power does come back on before the battery power fails completely, you won't even know it happened. And unless you put specific software to close applications in a meaningful way, the computer shutdown could get hung up with an app asking whether or not you want to save it, therefore holding up the shutdown until the power fails and the computer quits.

I don't want to sound like I need to make excuses for Apple, but we also need to remember that computers today do so much more than the simple tasks of yesterday. We expect them to do more for us and sync with other devices that we own so that they all work together. Not to mention that everyone else has to get into the game and create their own products that we expect to work with out computers.

I would only have to assume (me not knowing anything about programing) that creating an OS that works with everything has to be much more complex that yesterday. And let's also not forget that Apple Developers write a lot of the apps and programs that need to work with the OS. Also 3rd party developers which we blame apple for when things don't work.

So I guess there is a balance of trying to create the best OS and products out there while trying to give the mass consumers what they want. So, I tend to give them a break when something doesn't work quite right and we have to wait for a fix.

Glenn,

Thanks for that!

What you say makes perfect sense and sounds very reasonable to me :-)

Mark Sealey wrote:

Sadly - as a 25-year Apple advocate and customer - I have to agree about the negative aspects of their changes in direction towards mass consumerism as opposed to outstanding OS technology.

Personally, I think it is because they are trying to use the best possible technology that bugs like this creep into the OS.

25 years ago, OS's were much simpler, providing relatively few built-in services & not much security. For instance, if you wanted automatic backups, you had to buy expensive & hard to configure software. If you bought a UPS, you had to install proprietary software that came with it to get a 'graceful' shutdown feature, & it often didn't work very well. In fact, 25 years ago there wasn't even such a thing as USB, so you had to make sure your UPS had a port that was compatible with your Mac.

Builtin security was relatively primitive, but that was OK because there weren't many threats targeting OS X.

These days things are very different. We expect OS X to natively support dozens of services, many based on standards that Apple did not invent, including a few that contradict one another or have only recently been finalized. We also expect it to support third party additions, some of which alter the operation of the OS itself. We even expect OS X to protect us from increasingly sophisticated malware threats, & to do all this elegantly & silently, without our having to become IT professionals to use or configure it.

All these things add a lot of complexity to the code. I can't even begin to estimate the number of interdependencies among the parts of the current or recent OS X versions, but it is obvious that things that seem totally unrelated to users are in fact often related in ways that not even Apple's engineers can anticipate. This is nowhere more true than for things that affect the security of the system. Consider for instance the discovery of malware lurking in USB devices that can infect a system just by being plugged in. I suspect the new System Integrity Protection (SIP) feature of El Capitan was added in part to combat that threat, but that in turn may have necessitated redoing the USB class drivers & who knows what else.

Sure, it can be argued that bugs that introduced should have been eliminated before the final release of 10.11, but realistically that could take so much time that Apple had to decide if it was worth leaving the vulnerability to that kind of attack in place until all the bugs were eliminated. Since there is inherently very little certainty about that, my guess is they opted for better security ASAP, even at the cost of leaving some bugs un-squashed.

Yes, R C-R; agreed!

What I meant was that such sophisticated technology as is now available, current and almost universally implemented implicitly requires even greater resources devoted to it than seems at times to be the case when a company appears to be chasing market share with more general consumer electronics.

I am impressed, though, with Apple's diagnostics. I ran tmdiagnose and just now - in the course of a lengthy AppleCare call - submitted data from Capture Data, Apple's system diagnostic tool. I have confidence that their engineers will diagnose and fix this!

Strangely enough, while talking to their tech support, my TM ran on schedule for the fist time in days!

I also have a APC UPS. I fixed my issue by unplugging the USB cable and rebooting. It started a backup immediately. After that backup and the next hourly backup completed, I plugged the UPS USB cable back in. Backups have been running normally ever since. My machine runs 24/7 and is rarely shut down. If I need to reboot to install something, I do have to repeat the procedure or backups won't run normally.

Regards, Patrick

I mentioned this apparent UPS/USB connection to the Apple agent I spoke with as well.

It's with their engineers now.

I don't know how you came up with this, but it solved my time machine auto backup problem. I like others here had an APC UPS connected to my mac via USB. I tried unplugging it and restarting, reset SMC & NVRAM, set up a new Time Machine on a new disk. Nothing worked, only got a backup after wake from sleep or manually. Saw your post Friday, opened Airport Utility, hid it and Time Machine has been faithfully running every hour. Have not plugged the UPS back in yet, will give it another day or so then test that. Thanks Andrew, what a weird solution !

It seems to work with UPS and any other kind of USB plugins, but as to why, I cannot begin to conjecture.

Andrew, I tried this and in no way does it do anything. I don't exactly understand why Airport Utility would have anything to do with it, I just thought I would patronize this idea. Have you read this whole thread and understand the problem we are having? And the work around that does work? I think you are confused what this thread is about.

Sadly, this doesn't seem to work for me. I've been trying it ever since you posted, Andrew. After my daily morning restart, TM simply won't perform its scheduled hourly backups to my Time Capsule via ethernet with the USB cable attached.