Time machine backup not running

timmy_lawson wrote:

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.

The unplug workaround works for me & I have a TC connected by ethernet to my iMac. Have you waited to plug in the USB cable back in until after you have logged into a user account? If so, there are a few things you can try that might help.

One is to open Disk Utility & run First Aid on your startup drive. Also make sure your startup drive has not been added to the privacy pane of System Preferences > Spotlight.

I have this same issue, but I don't use a UPS. I do however, use an old USB hub that is between my Time Machine drive and the Macbook Pro.

I just upgraded to 10.11.1 so crossing my fingers, but sounds like other's have said it's not fixed. (It's not listed in the release notes either).

nigelkay wrote:

I have this same issue, but I don't use a UPS. I do however, use an old USB hub that is between my Time Machine drive and the Macbook Pro.

You could try temporarily connecting the TM drive directly to your MBP & not using the old hub at all. This would at least tell you if the hub is somehow involved.

It would help to know a bit more about your setup, too. Is it a powered hub? Is the TM drive bus or self powered?

R C-R wrote:

nigelkay wrote:

I have this same issue, but I don't use a UPS. I do however, use an old USB hub that is between my Time Machine drive and the Macbook Pro.

You could try temporarily connecting the TM drive directly to your MBP & not using the old hub at all. This would at least tell you if the hub is somehow involved.

It would help to know a bit more about your setup, too. Is it a powered hub? Is the TM drive bus or self powered?

Yes it's a powered Belkin USB hub. I did one time switch it to go direct to my Macbook Pro bypassing the hub, but it still failed. (But at the time I might have not have kicked off a manual backup before the auto backup which sometimes allows it to work temporarily.)

My first auto backup worked this morning after upgrade to 10.11.1 (on the hub), so I will wait to see what happens throughout the day.

Having the UPS disconnected from my iMac during the morning boot procedure (I have set to auto-login, so don't need to worry about logging in to my account as I'm the only user of the device) allows TM to adhere to its hourly schedule. This remains the case if I subsequently plug it in again although interestingly, it fires about five minutes after the time advertised in the TM preferences pane.

Apart from that, I have to remember to unplug the USB cable each evening before leaving my desk as my machine also backs up to an external RAID device using Carbon Copy Cloner (scheduled for later in the evening). This requires me to grovel under my desk to access the USB, thereby ruining my hairstyle and covering me in cobwebs as, so far, I've been too lazy to identify which cable is the right one to pull from the iMac.

So my first backup worked fine after connecting my drive to my USB hub after upgrading to 10.11.1, but the subsequent one did not. I always get the error "Backup folder cannot be created".

Again all this started after I upgraded to El Capitan. The first thing I noticed something wasn't right was that my hard drive started showing up on my desktop without the proper "Time machine" type icon, then my automatic backups stopped. Still continues in 10.11.1.

I reformatted the drive before and started it off clean, and same issue. First backup works, subsequent auto backups don't.

the error "Backup folder cannot be created".

This would seem to be a different error from that which most of the rest of us get, namely that the actual hourly scheduled backup appears to run; but in fact does not.

Maybe worth troubleshooting separately… permissions, space, even?

nigelkay wrote:

Yes it's a powered Belkin USB hub. I did one time switch it to go direct to my Macbook Pro bypassing the hub, but it still failed. (But at the time I might have not have kicked off a manual backup before the auto backup which sometimes allows it to work temporarily.)

I have had some problems with the reliability of certain older powered Belkin USB 2 hubs, particularly the oval ones that could be stacked with other Belkin accessories with the same shape, & that was long before I was running El Capitan or even Mavericks. I'm not sure what caused this but I suspect there was something about them that did not conform to the engineering changes made to the USB 2.0 standard. Newer ones, including revisions of the older ones & all their USB 3 hubs don't seem to have any problems. I do not know if this might be a contributing factor for you.

My first auto backup worked this morning after upgrade to 10.11.1 (on the hub), so I will wait to see what happens throughout the day.

Typically, the first auto backup after restarting the Mac or waking it from sleep will occur OK, but subsequent hourly ones will not, so to check for this you need to make sure your Mac doesn't sleep for at least two hours.

I was able to duplicate this scenario with my CyberPower UPS and my 2008 Mac Pro running 10.11.1. UPS plugged in USB, no backup, unplug USB from the CyberPower UPS, Time Machine backups proceed normally.

Apple responded to my Bug report that it is a duplicate of another report. That report is shown as (Closed). Maybe it will be in 10.11.2. We can hope. Since 10.11.2 is in beta maybe it won't be too many weeks/months before it is released.

I have just read a post by someone on another forum running 10.11.2 beta that the bug appears to have been fixed.

That would be very good news, assuming it proves to be correct when the 10.11.2 is released . . .

Excellent news. Thank you, Mark. Please let it be for me when 10.11.2 is released.

No! Dear Mark, JJGraphics and timmy_lawson... I'm sorry, but I see that the issue persists and I add again this my feedback.

You can see my image that persists also with... 😉 Note! Can does not talking about beta... 😉 😉

From 10.11, if the USB UPS cable is connected, in my iMac 27'', mid 2014 and full optional, this window appears:

<<Warning! You are using power supply with UPS. Save documents and shutdown your computer.>> each time that OS X start up or restarts.

An important trick!

You can record a little movie with an iPhone because this alert appears for a short time, care should be taken when appears the window to insert the login password.

This problem is associated to a SERIOUS ISSUE: if the USB cable of the Backup-UPS power supply is connected, Time Machine does not perform properly the hourly backups. If I disconnect the Backup-UPS cable from the USB port and I start OS X, instead, the hourly TM backup properly works.

All that I can say here about the betas (if this much) is there is more than one of them & until there is a final release available to everyone no assumptions should be made about what it does or does not fix.