Mojave time machine back up failing

Interesting because I could not submit a bug as long as I wasn't logged with my dev account.

And I couldn't send the bug report as long as the sysdiag file was not attached. Only that operation made the submit button available (without attach, it was just grayed out). Funny

Anyway, as much as more people post a bug, no matter which account or technics, the better.

Had this problem and was out of town, away from my Time Capsule last week. When I came back over the weekend, the backup proceeded and while it took awhile, backing up seems to have worked overnight Saturday night. Yesterday and last night it got stuck verifying but as of this morning, it believes it is backed up and has continued to do the interim hourly backups today pretty consistently. All of this started when I upgraded to Mojave in early December and immediately was unable to use TM on my TC. Happy to see that the bug is fixed but I don't know how, when, or what changed.

Anyone else have the same experience?

Yes, that’s a very odd inconsistency. I can see why they would (attempt to) limit it to developers where you would expect a certain level of expertise prior to reporting a “bug.”

I can only imagine what they receive on their public feedback page. :)

Hopefully, the efforts those of you with access to the Bug Reporter have been putting in will help Apple squash this fairly serious bug.

I had similar issues. I attached a second drive to perform the backup just in case my standard time machine raid drive was broken.

Repaired also the rights on the source drive with the recovery partition etc.

By coincidence I opened then the Time Machine in the preferences and unlocked the settings as admin.

Then the backups on all drives worked as usual.

I think all finding are related to the Apple SIP (Integrity Protecion) which was again improved in Mojave.

This is also reflected in the Konsole when you go through the crash and problem system messages.

Please try yourself and keep us posted.

This sounds really hopeful. But could you please explain where you found the facility to unlock the settings? I cannot find it in Time Machine/Preferences, and in System Preferences/Users and Groups, though I can unlock Login Options, I cannot see anything that refers to Time Machine.

"On a different tack, I reported the TM problems in the Apple Bug Reporter and submitted sysdiagnose files some time ago, and received the following reply from the engineers:

 'Time Machine intentionall yields to other processes in the system trying to do IO or CPU intensive tasks.  The diagnostic shows that Time Machine is heavily IO throttled because of all the other processes doing IO on your system. Most of the I/O seems to be coming from "Sync Folder Pro", but there is also significant IO from dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Clam AV (which is scanning files being synced by Syn Folders Pro and dropbox possibly?)  'It's hard to tell if Sync Folders Pro is just busy or malfunctioning.

I'd suggest trying the backup again when your system is less loaded.  If you continue to have problems please try disabling Sync Folders Pro and be sure that your AV software is not scanning your backup destination drive.  (You might want to experimentally disable the AV software and see if that helps as well)."    
 
In the light of this, I am now trying to back my system up again with TM, having first closed all running application. So far, it has been 'Preparing Backup' for 5 hours even though I did a mostly (but not entirely) successful backup a few days ago. I have submitted another sysdiagnose to Bug Reporter. If and when it does a backup, I shall report the result here, and submit another sysdiagnose to Bug Reporter. 

Why this text has gone red is beyond me!

 

                                                                                     

After wasting hours and days and reformatting drives until the cows came home (AND buying a new drive), I read this page about the crappy Time Machine for Mojave. Thanks a lot guys! I'll use SUPER DUPER from now on, geez! (And it makes a startup disk, too.)

My last post got garbled by the system! I shall try again to post the message from the Bug Reporter engineers.

'Time Machine intentionall yields to other processes in the system trying to do IO or CPU intensive tasks.  The diagnostic shows that Time Machine is heavily IO throttled because of all the other processes doing IO on your system. Most of the I/O seems to be coming from "Sync Folder Pro", but there is also significant IO from dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Clam AV (which is scanning files being synced by Syn Folders Pro and dropbox possibly?)

It's hard to tell if Sync Folders Pro is just busy or malfunctioning.

I'd suggest trying the backup again when your system is less loaded.  If you continue to have problems please try disabling Sync Folders Pro and be sure that your AV software is not scanning your backup destination drive.  (You might want to experimentally disable the AV software and see if that helps as well).'

So I turned every running application off and started a new TM backup, submitting several sysdiagnose files to Bug Reporter during its duration. 'Preparing Backup' lasted for nearly 6 hours. Then 'Backing up' began, became extremely slow at one stage, then accelerated madly to a finish about 3 hours after starting. As far as I can tell, the backup is complete.

It is clear from this whole discussion that TM's behaviour or misbehaviour varies hugely from one user's computer and its contents to another, but it does seem that, as indicated by the engineers' statement which I have now succeeded in copying and pasting (above), turning off applications — and especially other file-copying and transferring applications — may be the way to go.

I have had trouble with Time Machine for months and months.....I turned EVERY THING OFF and let Time Machine run all night, which it did.... only to see "FAILED" in the morning. I changed drives, reformatted, switched to a Thunderbolt drive, bought a new drive -- nothing works! But, thankfully, SUPER DUPER works! I'll use that from now on. Everybody reading this should, too.

I do not know Super Duper, but I use Carbon Copy Cloner as a second backup-generating application, backing up to a second partition on the same external drive that TM backs up to. CCC creates a bootable complete backup of my system. I used to run both CCC and TM simultaneously, but in the light of the Bug Reporter engineers' very valuable statement quoted in my previous post, I this time did not run CCC while testing TM, and shall not do so in future.

Ah, yes, Carbon Copy. I forgot about that one. Anyway, the clone idea is -- as far as I am concerned -- better than TM anyway. And they work. (I don't grasp what is wrong with TM, and I don't have the brains and time to find out. Apple says nothing useful that I can find.)

I thought my problem was solved with the reformat as case-sensitive tip, but my iMac is freezing again when a TM backup begins. It's not every backup -- and it had been working fine for a couple of weeks.

I'm just turning TM off for now. Defeats the purpose of automated, incremental backups, but I'm tired of troubleshooting. It's interesting to read how many hours of time, and purchases of new hard drives, have been incurred by TM users.

I 2nd THAT! If Apple had announced the problem, it would have saved me months of wondering and weeks of anguish and the repeated reformatting of several hard drives trying to get TM to work! Not to mention buying a new external hard drive. Thanks Apple! Forget TM, buy SUPER DUPER or CARBON COPY, instead.

Yeah, thanks, but I'll stick with SUPER DUPER from now on. It works, and the disk can also be used as a startup disk. This workaround, above, is a bit too "nerdy" for this 83 year-old. (It sounds to me like Apple's new OSX is suffering from an autoimmune disease. Why should it fight itself?) ;-)

Today (16 January) I tried backing up with TM again, but only closing SyncFoldersPro first. This time TM got stuck when 174.9 MB of 5.41 GB had been backed up. I have reported this in Bug Reporter, attaching a sysdiagnose. 

I shall wait for the next MacOS update in the hope that this TM problem will have been solved, and in the meantime shall rely on Carbon Copy Cloner. But it might be worth trying to disable System Security Protection before running TM as suggested by someone else in this string. Or even starting up in Safe Mode?

Obviously, the Mojave OSX has a bad bug problem with its TIM, which has been known and reported for many months. No update in sight, either, I guess. Best to simply forget about TM and use 3rd party programs from now on -- until Apple gets its thumb out.