Bitdefender and Time Machine Protection

Hi all,

about two months ago I bought a new MacBook Pro and I installed everything from scratch (that is, I did not restore a Time Machine backup). I have Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac installed and since a few weeks a notification from Bitdefender saying that it blocked an attempted Time Machine access pops up about once or twice a week.

Since that made me feel quite paranoid about being hacked I deleted my hard drive and completely reinstalled macOS (again, I did not restore the Time Machine backup afterwards). However, the notifications are still there and I feel really bad about them every single time they pop up. This really makes me anxious.

By the way: Whenever I run a virus scan using Bitdefender on my Mac, it cannot find anything.

To give you a better picture of what I am talking about, the notifications look as follows:

Antivirus for Mac

Time Machine Protection

/System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/C/XPCServices/com.apple.app kit.xpc.openAndSavePanelService.xpc attempted to make changes to a time machine backup (or similar as the text is too long to be displayed completely in the notification).

The same notification is sometimes displayed for /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SystemMigration.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ systemmigrationd instead of /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/C/XPCServices/com.apple.app kit.xpc.openAndSavePanelService.xpc.

Looking up the latter one in my console gives me the following information:

Jan 26 09:39:20 MacBook-Pro com.apple.appkit.xpc.openAndSavePanelService[25734]: assertion failed: 17D47: libxpc.dylib + 72637 [F7E5F1BC-614B-39CB-B6CE-92A9C7B7EC0B]: 0x89

Jan 26 10:19:11 MacBook-Pro com.apple.appkit.xpc.openAndSavePanelService[26397]: assertion failed: 17D47: libxpc.dylib + 72637 [F7E5F1BC-614B-39CB-B6CE-92A9C7B7EC0B]: 0x89

Jan 26 10:20:35 MacBook-Pro com.apple.appkit.xpc.openAndSavePanelService[26397]: BUG in libdispatch client: kevent[mach_recv] monitored resource vanished before the source cancel handler was invoked

Jan 26 11:04:59 MacBook-Pro com.apple.appkit.xpc.openAndSavePanelService[27027]: assertion failed: 17D47: libxpc.dylib + 72637 [F7E5F1BC-614B-39CB-B6CE-92A9C7B7EC0B]: 0x89

So, my questions are:

i) Is it normal that these applications (which seem to be from Apple) attempt to access my Time Machine backups, meaning Bitdefender is blocking them unjustified? If not, what could cause them and what can I do about it?

ii) Are the messages about "com.apple.appkit.xpc.openAndSavePanelService" in the console normal or is there anything wrong with them?

Of course, I contacted Bitdefender Support and they said that no application, not even ones from Apple, should make changes to old backups. So, according to them, something is wrong and I must have some kind of virus or have been hacked, which really upsets me. Strangely, their virus scan cannot find a thing. So, what should I do? Reinstalling macOS doesn't seem to be of help apparently. I am really, really desperate.

I would so highly appreciate any and all kind of help on this issue. This is driving me crazy.

Kind regards,

John