Sierra and Time Machine

I had the same issue TM was stuck for hours preparing backup, then stuck after backing up... 750kb ! TM appears to be up and running now, here is what I did:

1. Reset the SMC/PMU as per instructions given by @arizonadonn
2. added my TM disk to Spotlight's privacy list, then removed it
3. Removed my TM disk from the list of TM disks, then added it back
4. rebooted with the TM disk plugged in, waited until Spotlight was done with it (monitored through Activity Monitor, mds processes).

So far so good 🙂

Don't know if this is related, but my clean install (created a USB boot drive and completely wiped my iMac HDD) would start the Time Machine backup and constantly stall at around the 170Gb mark. No error messages, no failures reported.

After some command line snooping (can't recall the exact web site I got the tmutil script from) it appeared that a Mail prefs file was always the last file listed before stalling. No matter how many times I stopped the backup and restarted it, the prefs file was listed at stall point.....

Opened Mail whilst backup was stalled and Time Machine continued. Tested this 3 times and the only way my Time Machine would properly complete is if Mail was running during the initial backup. Subsequent backups continue with no issue so the prefs file doesn't appear to change once Mail is setup and seems to be locked when Mail is not running causing Time Machine to wait for it indefinitely until it is available to copy.

Well, this worked for me.

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