Sierra and Time Machine

I have the same issue.

After upgrading to Sierra, I encountered to very slow backing up at the first time, but it was still working (generating a backup).

Eventually it started not working at "preparing...," though.

I initialized the backup HDD and tried baking up.

The initial back up was done very smoothly and some of the following differential backups too.

However It started failing again at a new differential back up.

I repeated such (initializing the HDD, baking up from a scratch, making hourly differential backups, etc.) several times.

Eventually the process fails.

This morning I found a file named 2016-09-25-001350.inProgress in the backup HDD and I moved it to Trash (the file cannot be erased, though).

Since then the differential backup has been working several times.

I have to see if this has fixed the problem or not for some more time.

I feel that the above backup failure at a new differential backup started once the "initial encryption" was completed.

After the initial backup, the encryption started and went well. New differential backups were made smoothly during that encrypting. However suddenly after the (deemed) completion of encryption it appears to fail a new backing up.

I am not sure if the encryption is a cause of this trouble and if the encryption was truly completed.

I can look into and manipulate all of the folders/files in the backup HDD by Finder. Is this normal?

Setting "On-access scanning" to disabled in Sophos Anti-Virus resolved the always "Preparing Backup..." and the "AFP_VFS afpfs_vnop_ioctl: afpfs_FindForkRef failed -1" being logged continuously issues for me.

Disabling Sophos AV was the only change that I made.

Now, who's issue is it, Sophos or Apple. 😟

My story on a Mac mini (Late 2014, 2.6Ghz Intel, 8GB RAM): after upgrading to Sierra, Preparing for Backup lasted almost half an hour and concluded to a backup size of ~25GB but it was taking hours to complete on both my Time Machines (>8hrs to reach 109MB).

Mac, SMC and PRAM resets did nothing.

What worked: stop indexing my Time Machines for Spotlight and disabling Sophos.

Now everything's back to normal

Hope this helps

Wow man, you nailed it!!

I had the same problem, time capsule backup not working so I had attached an external usb drive. Again backup was very slow but when I switched off Sophos it's backing up very fast!!

Thanks!

Ron

Thank You, This corrected my backup problem. I turned off all protection and the backup started. I am now trying to see what part of Sophos is causing the problem.

My problem is still on going. Preparing back takes forever. Then it starts backing up, but at this rate it will take about 60 days to complete. I don't have sophos. This is very disappointing from Apple.

Try the spotlight exception. I don't have Sophos either but excluding the backup drive from spotlight immediately solved the issue for me.

Disabling Sophos fixed it in my case. Also, I tried access some old files in time machine from a backup a few months ago, and all I got was "waiting..." on the date I picked. Disabled Sophos and that also fixed that problem.

Well it did in my case too, however, it only solved Time Machine speed to my external USB disk.

The backup speed to my Time Capsule is still VERY slow, despite having switched off Sophos and Spotlight for the Time Capsule disk.

Something else is still not right....

Hi chuckosmund,

You by accident solved my question 🙂, see 'in response to jurkuipers' in the discusion I started.

Hope your TM-troubles are over by now.

Best regards,

Jur Kuipers, The Netherlands

disabling spotlight for the AirPort Extreme Drive and disabling Sophos on Access Scans fixed it only partially ... In principally the backup runs but very very slow 10GB in 2 Hours ... There is definitely something more wrong with the TM behavior of Sierra

Hi Don, I have been having the same issue but I saw that you had fixed yours. Can you help me? I skimmed through the feed and saw all of the actions you took but I am unclear as to what you found that finally worked for you. Where should I start?

Thanks!

OWRC, thanks. That seems to have resolved the "preparing back up" issue. Still very slow though. According to other posts, this maybe par for the course after a large update...