Time machine / Spinning wheel

Question

Time machine / Spinning wheel

Hi,

When Time Machine starts backing up, my computer keeps freezing and I see a spinning wheel. All the applications become slow or unresponsive. After a few hours, the backup seems to complete successfully. When no backup is running, the computer behaves normally. I have not been able to figure out what the problem is.

OSX: El Capitan 10.11.6 (15G31)

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2013)

Size of data on hard-drive ~ 220 GB

Backup location: time capsule; connected through wireless connection; size of data for backup ~ 380 GB; available size on time capsule ~ 1.6 TB.

Internal drive: APPLE SSD SM256E Media, 251 GB SATA

I have checked the integrity of the file system for my computer and the time capsule (using First Aid in Disk Utility). No problem was found. The hard drive (FileVault) and backup are encrypted.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)

Posted on Aug 22, 2016 4:38 PM

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Answer 1

Aug 23, 2016 10:38 AM in response to insulate.synopses.lipread

Do a test of the actual read and write speed of the SSD.. eg blackmagic disk test software. It should be extremely fast.

Open activity monitor and check the processor load and free memory.. although what activity monitor in El Capo actually shows is somewhat of a mystery.

Check the log for error messages.. although I doubt anything bad will show up.

Did you upgrade install El Capo over Yosemite etc?

Have you ever done an NVRAM and SMC reset? It is worth a go if you haven't.

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Answer 2

Aug 23, 2016 8:58 AM in response to LaPastenague

Hi,

Thanks for the help. Let me answer some of your questions.

I did a screenshot with Disk Speed Test. One is for the SSD, the other is for the Time Capsule. It looks normal to me.

The processor load and memory are normal. There is hardly anything running. For memory, 6GB are used out of 8 GB. Cached files is 1.9GB and Swap 570MB.

I did an upgrade for El Capitan. It was not the original OS and I did not reinstall from scratch.

NVRAM/SMC: I will try that.

Error messages: there are actually several error messages, although I don't know if this is significant or not. These are the first 3 errors that show up after the backup starts:

8/22/16 8:17:12.000 PM kernel[0]: 0xffffff803b3c9000

[59953|0] backupd async. scan: #'/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Mac Pro 13/2016-08-22-200001/Macintosh HD/.DocumentRevisions-V100/PerUID/501/643/com.apple.documentVersions/01AAEAF1-8 3ED-4BD9-9DF9-FC1B193FB9C3.pdf' act=0x02000000 errn:35 rsn='ETYP1' ln='1642'

8/22/16 8:17:15.000 PM kernel[0]: /BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/AppleFSCompression_kexts/AppleF SCompression-81.20.2/Compressors/Dataless/compressorType5Kext.c:545: Error: post_request error for /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Mac Pro 13/2016-08-22-201646.inProgress/F1EDB5E4-BE9B-4890-826A-2A32D75DEF68/Macintosh HD/.DocumentRevisions-V100/PerUID/501/643/com.apple.documentVersions/01AAEAF1-8 3ED-4BD9-9DF9-FC1B193FB9C3.pdf: 35

8/22/16 8:17:15.000 PM kernel[0]: decmpfs.c:1385:decmpfs_read_compressed: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Mac Pro 13/2016-08-22-201646.inProgress/F1EDB5E4-BE9B-4890-826A-2A32D75DEF68/Macintosh HD/.DocumentRevisions-V100/PerUID/501/643/com.apple.documentVersions/01AAEAF1-8 3ED-4BD9-9DF9-FC1B193FB9C3.pdf: decmpfs_fetch_uncompressed_data err -35

There are pages of these messages (~10,000). Note that I recently deleted the backup files and recreated a completely new backup. This did not make a difference.

Here is another type of error that shows up later:

8/22/16 8:53:21.000 PM kernel[0]: 0xffffff803b3c9000

[68|501] mds async. scan: #'/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Mac Pro 13/2016-08-22-201646.inProgress/F1EDB5E4-BE9B-4890-826A-2A32D75DEF68/Macintosh HD/Users/[...]/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Profile 8/Local Storage/https_discussions.apple.com_0.localstorage-journal' act=0x00000002 errn:0 rsn='ETYP1' ln='1620'

Pages of those (edited to remove my name). Note it's mds vs backupd for the previous one. Last error message for that backup:

8/22/16 9:16:23.000 PM kernel[0]: decmpfs.c:1385:decmpfs_read_compressed: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Mac Pro 13/2016-08-22-200001/Macintosh HD/.DocumentRevisions-V100/PerUID/501/643/com.apple.documentVersions/82DAB764-3 276-4CB1-862D-08FB768C10C5.pdf: decmpfs_fetch_uncompressed_data err -35

Note the start time:

8/22/16 8:16:04.258 PM com.apple.backupd[59953]: Starting automatic backup

and the amount of data that required backup

8/22/16 8:16:49.614 PM com.apple.backupd[59953]: Will copy (78.5 MB) from Macintosh HD

8/22/16 8:16:49.617 PM com.apple.backupd[59953]: Found 253 files (78.5 MB) needing backup

8/22/16 8:16:49.625 PM com.apple.backupd[59953]: 9.17 GB required (including padding), 1.62 TB available

78MB took about 1 hour.

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Answer 3

Aug 23, 2016 10:19 AM in response to LaPastenague

Follow up on my previous message. I did the NVRAM and SMC reset but that did not change anything.

I also noticed that the error messages in the console keep going even after the backup apparently completes.

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Answer 4

Aug 23, 2016 3:02 PM in response to insulate.synopses.lipread

Thanks for doing all the tests as requested.

Nothing abnormal looking there.

The error messages are too complicated for me to make anything much of them.

Fixing this is not going to be easy unless we can track the actual source of the problem.

What is the history of the problem?

Did it work ok before you updated OS?

Does the backup include the previous OS? So if you were running TM in Yosemite and then updated to El Capo we find that often causes TM to fail to work properly. When you add file vault plus encrypted backups to that, my best suggestion is to try a new backup.

If you have a spare USB drive handy.. plug it into the MBP and do a backup to it using TM. For the moment remove the TC backup from the list and tell me if the issue stops. If it does then you should erase the TC and do a new backup. Then you can remove the USB drive and see if the same problem continues.

If there is stuff in the old backup you want to keep archive it.. but I would recommend you remove the encryption as that can make life really hard later on. You can extract the backup from the sparsebundle and copy just that to a USB drive as well.

I do also recommend to people now that TM is less than reliable. I use an alternative.. CCC and especially to a local USB you can create a bootable clone. That gives you a backup that is alternative boot disk and makes it easy to get things working again.

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Answer 5

Aug 23, 2016 4:39 PM in response to LaPastenague

This problem goes back a long time. I don't remember when it first started to be honest. In fact I recreated the TC backup a few times. I even reformatted the TC and restarted a new backup from scratch. That made no difference. Curiously the first backup was reasonably fast (may be one night).

What is CCC?

I found this question on the forum with a similar problem (perhaps)

what is a decmpfs_fetch_uncompressed_data err -35

and that one

iMac freezes during TC backup

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Answer 6

Aug 23, 2016 6:49 PM in response to insulate.synopses.lipread

What is CCC?

Sorry I usually expand it.. to.. Carbon Copy Cloner.. a superior backup software for the Mac.

what is a decmpfs_fetch_uncompressed_data err -35

I have never seen the problem.. but I NEVER EVER use file vault or encrypted backups.. Clearly the operation of uncompressing the files and then compressing them again to backup is a mess.

This problem goes back a long time.

Perhaps inherent in the use of too much protection.

iMac freezes during TC backup

This thread is to do with 3rd party rubbish on your mac.

If you have any 3rd party stuff.. anti-virus, mackeeper etc.. be suspicious of it.

CCC is reliable and been sold for many years.. I do recommend it but I paid for a copy.. no free lister.

Curiously the first backup was reasonably fast (may be one night).

As the backup ages there is more and more work in comparing the backup to the actual install on the computer. This takes ages over wireless.. more ages when encrypted. More and more ages if it has more than one OS in it.. so like biblical proportions.. an age, two ages and half an age.

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Answer 7

Aug 24, 2016 8:42 AM in response to LaPastenague

Thanks. I will check CCC. That might solve my problems.

I am going to tinker around with encryption. It seems the problem may be related to this. Perhaps, decrypting and re-encrypting the drive, followed by starting a new unencrypted backup might clear up some problems.

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Answer 8

Aug 29, 2016 8:31 AM in response to insulate.synopses.lipread

I tried the following to no avail:

- Stop time machine

- Decrypt disk

- Re-encrypt

- Delete time machine backup

- Restart time machine with new backup

I still get the same error messages.

Looking at the error messages they seem all to point to the /.DocumentRevisions-V100 directory at the root of Macintosh HD. I am going to try to exclude this folder from the backup to see what happens.

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Answer 9

Aug 29, 2016 9:33 AM in response to insulate.synopses.lipread

Some more information on this.

I excluded /.DocumentRevisions-V100 from the Time Machine backups.

That did the trick. The backup now progresses quickly and I no longer have error messages in the console.

I looked again at the old error messages in the console. There is a clear pattern.

It starts with:

backupd async. scan: #'/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Mac Pro 13/2016-08-25-170327/Macintosh HD/.DocumentRevisions-V100/PerUID/[...]

This is a file inside the directory /Macintosh HD/.DocumentRevisions-V100. I removed the complete file name above.

Then this is followed by one or several of:

/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/AppleFSCompression_kexts/AppleFS Compression-81.20.2/Compressors/Dataless/compressorType5Kext.c:545: Error: post_request error for /[...]

decmpfs.c:1385:decmpfs_read_compressed: /[...]

for the same file. It's basically trying to perform some operation on the file, failing and attempting again.

This is repeated for a large number of files in /.DocumentRevisions-V100.

This is what was causing the machine to freeze and the backups to slow down to a crawl.

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