MacOS Sierra - time machine stuck preparing backup on Network devices

I have a similar issue but mine exits the back up after attempting to prepare the back up.

But oddly this only happens when connected via Wifi. If I connect my Macbook via Ethernet it backs up to a network just fine as it did before the upgrade to Sierra.

I have been trying to sort out this issue for over 6 weeks with Western Digital and the Router people to no success at all. Same issue what ever I try.

I hardly know how to break this to you guys, but Sierra just discovered the Synology Time Machine again and and backed up perfectly. No Sophos changes for awhile now, no Synology changes. Clearly both Sierra and Sophos continue to struggle with networked Time Machines, both Apple and 3rd party vendors just as initial reports indicated.

I'm really sorry to have to report this and hopefully you can get through it.

There's plenty of time left for it to fail.

You're absolutely right but obviously Apple is working on the issue and I trust them to get it right. Maybe they will even have therapy dogs available when all is well.

And you can come here and post when it fails again.

Hi John,

Actually, if you reread you will see that you completely misunderstood my message, probably unintentionally. In the future it would help our discourse and working relationship if you would respond what I write instead of what you may have thought or wished that I wrote.

To clarify once more, Synology Time Machine is not my "backup strategy". Neither Apple or other vendors' Time Machine implementation are not even close to being suitable for a backup strategy. Here is what I actually wrote:

"I have tested the Synology Time Machine with all of our Macs and it works well. It has already also proven itself in a situation where a MAC had a corrupted Parallels VM of approximately 60 MB. I have a coworker who has lost data despite using genuine Apple Time machine devices and the geniuses were unable to solve it. So I would say that Synology is good, Apple is good but nothing is perfect and a Time Machine backup... regardless of vendor, should not be anybody's only backup or their long term backup."

Not do be pedantic, but I am a distributed systems architect and security expert, so here are some basics: Time Machine does have its place as a small part of a backup strategy. It is invaluable for quick recovery of accidentally deleted files or corrupted files, such as a 60 MB corrupted Parallels VM on my wife's Mac. And it might be of some value for restoring a corrupted OS X installation after a disc crash or other mishap, but that is not something that anybody should be relying upon. Any true backup strategy involves rotating external discs and getting them offsite. 3 different mediums minimum, backups both on and off site and done mostly automatically and repetitively.

Of course I will. I love to help people and share my vast experience in distributed systems architecture and security. I'm sure that you have been taking some notes, and you are welcome to them.

Why would I need notes, your posts are all over the forum, I can read them.

Excellent, and glad to help.

Csound1 wrote:

Why would I need notes, your posts are all over the forum, I can read them.

Well, this forum is sometimes down. Hopefully you don't store your knowledge in web pages.

No, in my head (which is only occasionally down) But I won't ever forget you.

Likewise, and thank you for sharing your help and knowledge here with us.

Moving Sophos Live protection to off appears to have fixed the problem. One thing noted, when my machine was endlessly "preparing backup" the menu bar symbol did not change to opposing arrows. Once Sophos was off this changed. I have automatic backups off for the time being and I will be checking my system regularly by running Malwarebytes.

Continue the good work by getting rid of Sophos entirely.

OK, this is interesting. More and more of these Apple Sierra network issues are becoming clear.

After the Sierra update, Sophos prevented networked time machines from working, both for Apple devices and other vendors which have been implement the protocol across the last 4 OS X releases. I also noted an oddity here where Apple Sierra was struggling with standard AFP network paths. for example, /Volume/home to a network ceased working. By looking in /Volumes with ls -la I was surprised to see that Sierra had a /Volumes/home-1 path which was working, but that the /Volumes/home, while displayed, was non functional. At that time I noted that Sierra clearly had some issues in the networking area. Also, networked Time Machines were now failing with Sierra whereas they continued to function perfectly with El Capitan machines.

Then I had a minor Sierra update and voila... suddenly Time Machine began functioning again. Then, while running some weekly scripts which I had modified AFP paths to home-1 accommodate to Sierra's AFP networking bugs, I noticed that they were no longer functioning. It turns out that the Sierra 10.12.1 update corrected the newly introduced underlying AFP bugs which impacted both AFP and Time Machine access. The home-1 path is gone.

So, get Sierra 10.12.1. Apple has fixed the Sierra network layer and both the Time Machine protocol and AFP network paths function properly at this point. Obviously there was some major rewriting in this area or it would not have made it past a beta. I imagine that this has caused some work for Sophos and it does explain the concerns which folks have raised here that Sophos should have caught this during the beta. I'm a long time distributed systems architect and developer and many of you use my products every day if you've ever so much as touched your money electronically over a network, so I know of what I speak.

Failure is to be expected when using unsupported methods.