Sierra and Time Machine

I am with you on this brother! The moral of the story is never upgrade to the latest OS. I just upgraded form Snow Leopard to Sierra, and I only did that because safari had become unusable and I don't like the other browsers. I don't know what came over me. If I had taken my own advice I would have upgraded to El Capitan. Thankfully, I don't have any problems except that Word 2011 crashes occasionally. I would not touch Time Machine with a barge pole. You need a regular CCC backup running in parallel or you will regret it. Maybe not today or tomorrow but...

No, the moral is don't update while you are unprepared, those who prepare properly are the ones not asking for help here.

My iMac and my printer are both less than a year old!

How can you prepare for TM not working when it worked fine with El Capitan? Apple do not produce a list of known conflicts or compatible/incompatible hardware and software to see if what you are currently using will work after the upgrade! All they offer pre-upgrade is: Check your Mac hardware. Guess what, my system complies with all of the Apple requirements!!

Apple have not officially stated anywhere that I can find that USB fax modem solutions are not supported in Sierra. None of the Apple support staff I have spoken too over the last couple of weeks have been aware of this!!

My Canon printer worked just fine with El Capitan and is supported by Sierra. Trouble is Apple missed something in Sierra and had to issue a macOS update to clear an error when printing a disc label.

So, Csound1, where did I go wrong in my preparation? Should I have got my crystal ball out or should I have bought all new hardware and software?

Finally, one of your posts not removed. Problems with print drivers (if that is what it is) are the responsibility of those who write them, which in your case would be Canon.

Preparation includes the making of a full backup, can I assume that you did that?

Seems Apple does not like truth or honesty!!

How many holes are you willing to dig before you give up?

The issue with the printer was caused, and resolved, by Apple, not Canon, hence the macOS update.

Unfortunately, Apple have not yet resolved the issue with TM.

Neither have they resolved the issue with USB fax modems and I doubt hey will!

Believe whatever you want to.

I'm done with you.

Well, I fixed my TM problem last week, and now have a very good understanding of the problem so I thought I would share the solution.

First of all, there are many "solutions" given in this thread. Each one may work for the individual that posted the solution, but in general there is a trend. And this trend indicates that TM has been reset by Apple to have a very low priority. It is possible to up this priority. More on this later but it is not necessary.

However, recognizing that TM has a low priority, if any other application is busy, it will take over the activity, putting to sleep TM. Most of these apps are system related apps. In my case secd was the app that took over.

Activity monitor is the key to diagnosing the problem. Look at the CPU usage, and look at where backupd is listed. Typically, it will by way down the list. Your assignment it to get it first on the list by shutting down anything else that is hogging the CPU, typically system junk. Just don't kill the system stuff, find out by googling the app what it is doing and shut that down. Until you get backupd at the top of the activity CPU usage list, TM sleeps.

I have seen on this thread to turn off wireless, to trash Norton antivirus software and other antivirus products, to turn off many other apps. Obviously, Norton is always running, so it will always shut down backupd, etc.

It is also possible to increase the priority of TM using "nice" and "renice"which is a unix app invoked in terminal. Its not necessary to fix TM this way, but can be done.

My solution:

I have a Time Machine HD directly connected to my iMac. It wouldn't complete any backup since switching to Sierra UNTIL I DISABLED WI-FI.

The backup was stuck at about the 3/4 mark for hours. As soon as I turned off Wi-Fi, it started up again and completed quickly.

As of now, backups will not complete if I have Wi-Fi on, but as soon as I turn it off, they complete quickly.

In may case, this has nothing to do with Sophos or anti-virus software.

Just thought you guys might like to try this solution too.

So your solution is to disconnect the Internet when you want to backup?

There is a lot of information about this issue and it is important to read it.

I found that after trying "everything" I read, nothing resolved the issues of Time Machine in Sierra.

This is what I did to resolve: I downloaded the 10.12.1 standalone combo upgrade and installed it.

Note: the machine was already on 10.12.1 but it is ok to re-install it - fills in the gaps and can/did fix the issue.

Another NOTE ( important) It is always a concern when you are doing work like this to a Mac that is not backed up. In this case there was no way to backup with Time Machine. It is important to know that you can always perform a manual backup of your data to an external drive before you do major operations to your Mac.

After the install:

(1) I started a new backup on a new backup drive

Note: I have no idea if this fix works with an existing Time Machine backup. I would guess that it does.

(2) I went to System Preferences and chose the Spotlight pane - Clicked on the Privacy tab and the added the Time Machine backup drive and the Macintosh HD to the items to prevent searching.

(3) I started the new backup and it worked normally. (about 400GB backed up)

(4) After the backup was complete, I went back to the Spotlight preference and deleted the Time Machine and the Macintosh HD.

(5) I performed a backup of a small file I added and it worked - The Time Machine continues to work now.

Thanks for this! Time Machine hasn't backed up to my Time Capsule since upgrading to 10.12.2. It's now just an over-glorified wi-fi router. Really need to back up my stuff Apple...

Great worked for me with Kaspersky after waiting 3 days to back up 3.5TB

I upgraded from 10.12 to 10.12.2 and .3. At all times TimeMachine worked normally (and still does). The problem is an individual one.

Take an etrecheck report and post it here.

Etrecheck

Are you backing up to a network disk, or a local disk? If it is a network disk, is it attached to a Mac running OS X Server? What version?

Thanks.

Update: Under 10.12.3 my Time Machine can talk to my Time Capsule for incremental backups again!