Sierra and Time Machine

This solved my problem. Thanks.

Same issue here. I'll try with some of the options you guys suggest and will let you know.

Executive Summary: Turn your virus checker off, then try a Time Machine backup.

Very similar issues here... I tried everything I could think of, even moving disks to different USB ports, starting, stoping, etc. I'll spare everyone the details. Throughput rates on Time Machine were just terrible. 8 Hours of backing up and it had copied only 20Gigs of a 1TB backup. Transfer rates were in Kbps, not Mbps... While reading the above pondini.org site, and searching for clues, I found a comment about virus checkers... hummm.... that was it. I have Sophos AV loaded, and it appears to have been checking every single file as Time Machine was backing it up. Of course, that's just a guess as to what it was actually doing, but going into Sophos, and adding the Time Machine disk as an excluded item, and then turning it off during the initial backup fixed the problem for me. In 30 minutes time machine has backed up more than the last 8 hour run that I tried last night. It's now running at about a Gig per minute, so looking at a 16 hour backup, but on a new Sierra install with 1TB of backup to do, it's probably within reason. Hope this helps.

Finally got a good result.

1. Disabled all Power Saver options to make the machine work through the night at full speed.

2. Excluded Time Machine HDD from Spotlight indexing.

3. Only running ClamX software; didn't touch it.

4. Had already erased TM drive.

5. Disabled scheduled Super Duper copy.

6. Started TM backup at 11 pm, and went to bed.

Next morning woke to message that "First backup" had completed at 3:30 am.

Ran another backup (440MB), took about 3 minutes. All seems to be working now.

arizonadonn wrote:

It's stuck on 'Preparing Backup'.

Please read macOS Sierra: If Time Machine remains in the “preparing” stage.

Tried that this morning. Still stuck on "preparing back up" for an hour. I will wait for the rest of the day to see if it resolves itself.

Same here: while sophos is running the backup hangs filling the logs with error "kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_vnop_ioctl: afpfs_FindForkRef failed -1".

When I disable the online scanning of sophos get backups go through just fine.

Oddly, it seems to affect only automatic backups. If I cancel a hanging backup and then start it manually the backups works, too.

Hi arizonadonn

For the records... Exact same issue, no antivirus, have followed all steps recommended (except clean reinstall, which is so long I would use it only if there is really no other fix)... And no luck so far.

Problem still there.

Hoping Apple will add a patch in the next Sierra update.

A bit frustrating!

Thanks all for sharing all your tips.

JB

Same TM Issue. So I switched backing from Time Capsule to another HD and it worked immediately.

Is this a TC issue?

My Time Machine was stuck too. Following advice on this forum I added my backup drive to the Spotlight exceptions. A few minutes after that action a pop up advised that I create a new back up file and Time Machine started its thing.

Thanks for suggestions.

In my case, I uninstalled the Sophos antivirus and it is backing up without any problem. It has already backed up 50gb in an hour. 🙂

I turned off Sophos on demand scanning, and my Timemachine backup is finally running, and backing up to my Time Capsule. In trying to figure out how to solve this, I ran across a useful command which can be entered in Terminal and which allows you to monitor the progress of a Timemachine backup.

log stream --style syslog --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --info

OK...

I link your info to the discussion I started...;

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

Jur Kuipers, The Netherlands

Put in the Terminal Command log stream --style syslog --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --info

TM is running, but... no Terminal TM-info here...

Sorry @chuckosmund ...

I was wrong...

Just got TM-info in Terminal... !!!

Thank you!

Jur Kuipers, The Netherlands