Time Machine constantly making new backup

Hi Bob,

Sorry, I hadn't noticed your post... there are a lot of posts on this, and various threads. I must admit, I'm not too hopeful as I've lived with this issue for over five months now and no-one seems to know how to fix it. I've also been told before that it's been escalated up to the engineers, however, I've never been asked to submit my logs before (which I'm doing now... all 1.4GB of them).

Hopefully someone will find out what this is and fix it... but I'm not holding my breath!

I'll update all if I have any progress.

What we can learn from your experience (and several others I've read) is that Apple has yet to disseminate this problem down to their support staff, who are pointlessly replacing Time Capsules at presumably considerable expense to the company with no real prospect that it will actually address the issue. Difficult to know what to make of that. Does the left hand not know what the right hand is doing, or is the right hand actually not doing anything?

This affects more than just time capsules though. I have a Sierra server with an attached lightning HD i in raid as my solution. It has worked flawlessly for two years and then Sierra started acting up like this.

I may need to edit my "possibilities" above to update them to a more accurate description. Option 3 would move to.....

3) Apple never really was "working on it", but might now be deciding whether they will be "working on it".

Another user suggested another option as well......

4) Apple never will be "working on it".

Sure would help if we could at least get a consistent message from Apple on this issue. I'm prepared for option 4) though.

Bob, see the above comment. I knew I'd seen this reported before but could not remember where. Now we have another sighting of a local drive backup failure in Sierra. Server I guess, and a RAID setup, so more variables to consider.

I am kind of shocked really to hear that Apple is telling their support staff to replace Time Capsules when this problem is reported. Not sure this is covered by any of your current scenarios.

If Apple were telling their support people to replace Time Capsules when the issue is reported, then my Time Capsule would have been replaced multiple times. No such offer was made to me when I last spoke to Apple Support a few weeks ago, but I suppose it is possible that Apple has changed their policy very recently.

Even if Apple swapped out the device, there has not been a single documented hardware change on the Time Capsule since it was introduced almost four years ago in June 2013. So, I don't see how a Time Capsule swap would help the issue. I had corruption issues with the older versions of the Time Capsule as well.

When and if Apple announces something in writing, we'll know more.

Tech support is working in a diagnostic decision tree system. If not A, then B. At some point in some of these conversations with customers, they are getting to "defective hardware." How or why, we don't know. All we know beyond that unfortunately is they never get to "a software problem we will fix." We know that swapping out the hardware is not the solution, but apparently Apple believes this is an appropriate fix for some. Not that it works.

I had a defective Time Capsule. Right out of the box the HDD would not format. Support walked me through all the diagnostic steps (that I'd already tried), and when it was clear to them that none of that was going to work, they sent me a replacement.

Hi Bob, et-al.

I just had a conversation with Fernando (who has been helping me since Hayley is no longer with the company). As others had guessed, his response was that the engineers had come back to him and said they are aware of the issue and are looking into a fix. I cited this article and the fact that the engineers have been aware of my case since at least January this year (thanks to Hayley) and about other cases for long before then. I made it clear that the engineers response, frankly isn't good enough, as if my hard drive fails, I will lose all of my information. He initially told me that he couldn't do anything further, but I persisted as my time capsule is little more than an expensive paperweight at the moment, he then put me on hold and when he came back he said he was going to re-esculate it. To be honest, I'm not holding my breath for a resolution, but he said he call me back next week with a further update (he seems like a good guy, so hopefully he'll give this the required push).

I'm at the stage now where if I'm fobbed off again next week, I will be escalating this via Apple Customer service - not sure if that will accomplish anything, but its issues like this that result in customers changing their brand loyalty.

Perhaps others on this forum can also start complaining (those who are not already) as the more people who make this an issue for Apple, the quicker they will resolve it.

Kind regards,

Stephen

Thanks for the update.

As others had guessed, his response was that the engineers had come back to him and said they are aware of the issue and are looking into a fix.

What the support folks will not tell you is that the engineers were "aware of the issue" and were "looking into a fix" when the issue first appeared in Snow Leopard.

Keep us informed on your progress if you can. Good luck!

Hi all,

Just had another call from Fernando - once again I was told that the engineers are looking into this and there's nothing else that can be done. The last idea Fernando had was to completely wipe my Mac and reinstall, as he doesn't think it will copy the issue which he believes is in my Sparse bundle - I've arranged to do this with him on Sunday, as I'm not near my iMac today.

A concern I had after the phone call is around my Bootcamp set-up (as I have Windows 10 installed on my system too) - my concern is that if my system is wiped, will I lose all this information. This led me to think, that perhaps that's what the issue is with the back-up, as I do not have Bootcamp/Windows installed on my MacBook Air, and this backs-up perfectly... do any of you also have Bootcamp installed?

Kind regards,

Stephen

Shaft80,

I did the complete wipe and clean install of Sierra and it DID NOT solve the problem. I even created a different user profile to no avail. Right now I am using the Time Machine Editor set to backup every 24 hours and it has been working for two whole weeks so far (Whoopee!!). I'm not going to hold by breath though that this is any kind of real fix, just delaying the inevitable.

IT is only my 5k iMac that seems to have the problem though. I have a Mac mini and my wife's 21.5" iMac running on the same Time Capsule with no problems, go figure?

Thanks rscharf - that's a shame, as I thought I might have cracked it for the engineers 🙂

It is my 5K iMac too that has the issue, with my MacBook Air backing-up fine (also using Sierra). I just find it strange that it doesn't happen to everyone (as surely if it happened to a high percentage Apple would work on a solution quicker). I wonder if there's some common ground between us all except that we all have Sierra.

Oh well - my next step is to complain up the chain at Apple (not sure this will get me anywhere but I refuse to just be ignored when I've spent a fortune on Apple products which aren't fulfilling their purpose.

Cheers, Stephen

You've put your finger on the real peculiarity of this issue. The common thread of who is affected by it and why hasn't been established. I have a theory that it derives from low memory situations but of course cannot prove it.