Hi.
So I upgraded to Sierra yesterday morning.
Time Machine has been stuck since.
It's stuck on 'Preparing Backup'.
It's been about 18 hours.
At what point should I worry? And suggestions on a fix?
Don
iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.1)
I too had this issue.
I updated to High Sierra yesterday and today started backup which was quite painful, as first it took time machine hours to prepare backup and then years to back up for just 125 GB backup..which never happened. Even formating the external drive for time machine.
I have a MB Pro early 2015, with Bitdeffender Anitivirus as well as Malwarebytes installed on it.
I disabled both and stopped indexing of the backup drive.
Started manual backup and it was quite pretty to see it tugging along at good speed.
Now it is showing about an hour for backup to complete.
May be it is because of the first back up as I had previously erased the disc.
UPDATE: I just performed a manual backup of some 50-60GB. I haven't seen a failure message on my screen. This backup did however not update the date of my latest Time Capsule backup (ie, 21 September 2016). Nevertheless, the free available space on my Time Capsule has again decreased by some 50-60GB. This seems a weird contradiction.
Very happy it helped you! 🙂
I posted a set of steps given to me by a tier 2 support rep at Apple. Perhaps you can look at the post I've written to see if this helps you.
I'm using Sophos Anti-Virus Home Edition version 9.5.2 and followed your advice. Stopping the on-access scanner did the trick.
Thanks!
You are very welcome! Yes Time machine has been working like a champ since i ditched Sophos antivirus. After doing some reading i realised we don't need antivirus software anyway. or disk optimisers etc. ditch them all and run a nice clean system. Sierra running sweetly now.
Thank you sooooooo much! I have been on the phone to Apple support for hours trying to resolve this! A simple on/off switch and hey presto! Thank goodness!!!
Call Apple tech support. Even if your computer is out of warranty, they are taking the calls with no charge.
Mary
The first time I tried this, it started to back up, but it was taking so long, i aborted the process. I decided to try it again. Began the process Thursday evening, and it finally completed the back up my 1.69 TB at 1 am Monday morning. Seems to be backing up normally now. Gonna reinstall Sophos but not till after a fix is announced. Thanks again Entropee.
Same here. Backups were running like treacle. Temporarily switched off the Sophos "on-access scanner" and the backup immediately ran light lightning.
Lightening means to change color to a less dark one or reduce the weight of it, I think you meant to say Lightning.
UKDazza wrote:
Temporarily switched off the Sophos "on-access scanner" and the backup immediately ran light lightening.
Permanently lighten your Mac by uninstalling the utterly worthless non-Apple "anti-virus" junk burdening it.
After getting Sierra 10.12.1, Time Machine backup log shows new messages which I didn't see before 10.12.1
"localhost mtmd[917]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine.TMLogError] -[FileAttrs writeAttributesToItemAtPath:] setattrlist failed for path" is followed by the following four types of error messages. Does anyone have any ideas bout the message?
By the way, having 10.12.1 and Sophos 9.5.3, there has been no improvement anyway. It stuck at "preparing" and/or very slow with Sophos ON.
'/.MobileBackups/Computer/2016-10-26-080748/Volume/System' (errno 1)
'/.MobileBackups/Computer/2016-10-26-080748/Volume/System/Library' (errno 1)
'/.MobileBackups/Computer/2016-10-26-080748/Volume/System/Library/Assets' (errno 1)
'/.MobileBackups/Computer/2016-10-26-080748/Volume/System/Library/Assets/com_app le_MobileAsset_LinguisticData' (errno 1)
'/.MobileBackups/Computer/2016-10-26-084458/Volume/Library' (errno 1)
'/.MobileBackups/Computer/2016-10-26-084458/Volume/Library/Preferences' (errno 1)
'/.MobileBackups/Computer/2016-10-26-084458/Volume/private' (errno 1)
'/.MobileBackups/Computer/2016-10-26-084458/Volume/private/var' (errno 1)
'/.MobileBackups/Computer/2016-10-26-084458/Volume/private/var/db' (errno 1)
'/.MobileBackups/Computer/2016-10-26-084458/Volume/System' (errno 1)
'/.MobileBackups/Computer/2016-10-26-084458/Volume/System/Library' (errno 1)
'/.MobileBackups/Computer/2016-10-26-084458/Volume/System/Library/Assets' (errno 1)
'/.MobileBackups/Computer/2016-10-26-084458/Volume/System/Library/Assets/com_app le_MobileAsset_DictionaryServices_dictionaryOSX' (errno 1)
I am not doing all these ridiculous "fixes" to get my Time Machine to work with Sierra. Apple should have this sorted by now. The latest update had nothing in it for TM.
I am afraid my TM is going in the bin!!
You made the bad decision to use ridiculous 'anti virus' software, now you can make another bad decision. Have you considered buying a Windows machine, many bad decisions to be made with those.
Just ditch Sophos anti-virus and you are good to go. You don't need it. Time machine is much more useful!
Its the developers job to make sure their Apps are compatible with new OS. Sierra previews have been available for many months and apparently Sophos did not check compatibility with Time machine.
Im happy to ditch Sophos, but time machine is essential!
Sierra and Time Machine
