Sierra and Time Machine

followup to my previous posting

I don’t see the final solution yet.

These are what I have experienced up to now.

At a very early stage, immediagely after upgrading to Sierra, I experienced the inPgogress-file issue a couple of times but not now.

At the moment I see two types of issues (all are about the incremental backup):

a) the backup stays at “preparing” forever

b) the backup is very slow

In case the backup keeps “preparing” for long, %CPU stays at over 95% and the console repeats very quickly as:

default hh:mm:ss.ssssss +hhmm kernel AFP_VFS afpfs_vnop_ioctl: afpfs_FindForkRef failed -1

There is no way other than stopping the backup. However I haven’t seen clear reasons of this occurrence.

It is up to about 35%, if the operation is normal.

As to slow operations, NAS and Sophos have some impacts. Sample data of four consequent backups are:

NAS/Sophos ON　31min　5.73GB (794MB) = 0.18GB/m

USB/Sophos ON 9min　 7.14GB (719MB) = 0.80GB/m

NAS/Sophos OFF 5min　 4.91GB (107MB) = 0.98GB/m

USB/Sophos OFF 27sec 6.4GB (103MB) = 14.2GB/m

where as

NAS: backup HDD (USB3.0) is attached to Airport Extreme (Tx Rate 450Mbps 802.11n 5GHz, 40MHz RSSI -43dBm)

USB: backup HDD (USB3.0) is directly attached to MBP 15 (2013E)

Sophos: 9.5.2/engine 3.65.2

xxGB: required (including padding)

xxMB: needed

Note, however, that the elapse time is not stable/constant but fluctuates very largely among backups.

arizonadonn wrote:

Do you think Apple monitors these forums and makes notes or 'fixes' based on these posts?

No.

Did you read my earlier reply to you?

YES THEY DO!

This afternoon I had Apple Care United States on the Phone (AppleCare Outreach) "on behalf of Apple Engineering" (!!)

This was regarding my question about Console and Time Machine.

Re: Re: How can I see Time Machine activity in Console with macOS Sierra.

I can say no more because of "confidentiality restrictions"

What I can say is that Apple is following the discussions regarding Time Machine!

I appreciated that Apple reached out to me.

Now you know.

Jur Kuipers, The Netherlands.

I have the same thing happening. Talked with a very kind Senior Tech who told me I need a new Time Capsule since what used to work perfectly before the Sierra update will not work. I took his advice(though hesitantly and not trusting Apple much these days) and got a 4 TB external drive to do my backup on. Now the TIME MACHINE is taking 48 hours to do 8 GB. Only 938 GB to go. At this rate I can update this question in two weeks. Holy crap for crap! I should have trusted my gut and held off on the update. NEVER UPDATE IMMEDIATELY. I have another gut feeling. This is Apple's way of getting us all on the Cloud. I DO NOT believe this is coincidental. At all.

I had this week a long call with a very friendly assistant of a special taskforce support team of Apple. This team is currently very strong investigating the issues around Sierra and TimeMachine. Also they are contacting proactive a selection of users which should provide a bunch of special log and test data to Apple. Since Apple contacted me and not I contacted Apple I was very glad surprised about the kind of work as Apple here act by scanning this forum.

With respect to this kind of work I'm absolutely sure that Apple is taking the issues very very seriously. Remarks as the last here that Apple will force us to the cloud by producing such issues are total nonsens and stupid.

As Apple scan this forum it could helpful to announce your willing here if you are:

- able to describe exactly the issues which only should appeared since the update to Sierra (free of emotions)

- have the issues with a more or less new Apple Hardware

- NOT have installing a Virus scanner like Sophos

- The TM Target ist an original Apple product (AirPort Extrem, Time Capsule - not a netatalk using NAS like Synology)

- familiar with the Terminal program

- willing to have a longer call with Apple and providing private log data to Apple

- noted a reachable phone number in the Apple-ID account data

After applying a suggestion from this forum (ie, automatic TC backup OFF, delete small TM file, put FireWall on OFF, restart iMac, and manual TC backup), I was happy to see that the backup process by TimeCapsule seemed to work again. However, after backing up some 40 GB it gave another error message. This same problem has also happened a few years ago after a similar OS migration. I seem to recall that a TC firmware update solved these issues. I keep on monitoring all your suggestions on this forum in order to try these shortcuts.

I am using a mid 2011 iMac with OnyX maintenance software but without antivirus software. My 2TB TimeCapsule is of 2012. I am happy to assist Apple in solving this nuisance.

"Since Apple contacted me and not I contacted Apple I was very glad surprised about the kind of work as Apple here act by scanning this forum."

As I mentioned, Apple also contacted me.

Apple is monitoring discussions regarding TM.

To suggest there's some kind of conspiracy going on is not helpful and completely ridiculous.

kt-top is wrong, I can understand his frustration though...

Let's hope Apple comes up with a fix soon.

Jur Kuipers, The Netherlands

In my case, Time Machine hourly backups do not occur, though backups initiated manually appear to work as usual. When the "Next Backup" time is reached, the time indicator in the Time Machine preferences pane simply advances an hour, while the "Latest Backup" remains unchanged.

I've tried unchecking and rechecking the "Back Up Automatically" box, rebooting, and disconnecting/remounting the backup drive, all to no avail.

Thank you SO much, Entropee for these very thorough, simple instructions! Hard to believe you're a Level 1 because you're pretty ****** good at idiotproofing fixes for the rest of us! I called Apple and someone called "Mark" knew nothing that you did, and even less than me. I eventually gave up on him and went back to sorting this myself. Having a horrible time with a very confused MacBook Pro so facing a clean install (PleaseGodNO!) with an equally confused backup. Cannot do a straight migration back so absolutely HAVE to have a good backup in Time Machine before going forward and yours was the only good answer. Worked like a charm. Took less than 20 minutes to 'prepare' - as opposed to 8+ hours previously- and it's chugging away nicely with the backup now. You're a star...

Now if I could get the 'Helpful' button to be the vaguest bit helpful with your post, I'd make sure other people should read and try it. But I can't. It does nothing. Much like my TM until you. Sorry...

When this first happened, I tried a few of the steps listed in this discussion, but none of it seemed to work. What I eventually did was just left my computer on for a few days, and eventually my Mac got out of "Preparing Backup" and performed the TM backup. But it did take days. After that, I had a day of quick, back-to-normal backups. Yesterday, however, my Mac once again entered the painfully long "Preparing Backup" mode. The only thing I did yesterday was boot my Mac in Safe Mode because I was also having the problem of the Mac not shutting down or restarting properly (would hang with a black screen -- rebooting in Safe Mode fixed this issue for now).

For kicks, I tried the steps listed by Entropee. However, my external hard drive (OWC Mercury Elite, 1.5TB) is listed under "Devices" in the Finder window and not "Shared," so I couldn't do all the steps verbatim. End result -- no change to being in "Preparing Backup." I may let it go again for days and days and see what happens.

So now my Mac sits, broken-hearted. Tried to back up, but it's barely started.

Hello:

This is an update to my earlier post:

I have a slightly different experience.

In my case, as I posted a little earlier, ON/OFF of Sohpos affects the backup speed dramatically but is nothing to do with backup freezing (to be exact "endless preparing"). This is common to NAS HDD/direct-USB-connected HDD, and auto/manual kicking.

Once it is in the endless preparation, %CPU of backupd soars over 95% and the console is filled up with

default hh:mm:ss.ssssss +hhmm kernel AFP_VFS afpfs_vnop_ioctl: afpfs_FindForkRef failed -1

, which I don't know the meaning.

ko

Almost all of my Sierra machines made in the meanwhile succesful Time Machine backups on different backup targets (Airport Extreme, Time Capsule, Netatalk TimeMachine Linux Server).

Only one machine ( an Early 2015, 13" MacBook Pro, i7, 16GB RAM on AirPort Extreme) refused backups - by endless preparing backups.

Today I started a new try:

- stop the TM

- scrap the current backup

- restart the Airport Extreme

- mount the Backup-Volume

- add as a new TM-Volume

- start the Backup

- TM was asking to created a new backup

... after a while I got the message that the backup could not created but TM in the System preferences shows alway the preparing state and a small sparsebundle was build on the TM volume

Than I repeat the procedure as described before but befoire I start I added the mounted Backup-Volume to the privacy settings of Spotlight as described by some users here in the forum

- and ...

- ta da ... it started the backup after a few muinutes with an aacceptable performance

So in summary as I had also some troubles with on access scans of Sophos on other machines I guess there is a problem with the concurrent file access behavior of the TM daemons with other high performant access daemons like virus scanners or like here Spotlight

After having tried the other methods to no avail, I tried this, and it seems to be working. I started the backup process before leaving for work this morning (8 am) and when I got home at 6pm it said it was cleaning up old backups. Then about 6:30 it started backing up. But it's sloooow. It took one hour to back up the first GB. It's taken almost 2 hours to get close to the 2nd GB - of 148.77 TB. This may take a while.

btw, no Sophos.

I'd wait for Apple to come up with a fix for this as it is obvious they have no clue what to do yet with it. Don't be like me and go off of their advice to buy another external. It's not the external drive, it's Apple's issues with their updates. I have been backing up for the last 4 days and have only 138GB of the 938GB initial backup. It is backing up but extremely slow. And if it goes the way the other times have gone on my Time Capsule then it will cut out at halfway. I still think this is Apple trying to get everyone over to the Cloud. Just my assumption though I have received very angry feedback from fellow Apple peeps about even thinking about that conspiracy. But I think they have taken the blue pill and believe that everything Apple does is perfect without possible agendas. I love my Apples, don't get me wrong. But this is a constant with them. Do an update and screw up your new computer that once ran like a Ferrari. Now, a Pinto.