Mojave time machine back up failing

Greetings to Michael Graubart! Today, I turned 83, and I agree with what you write completely. I started with a Commodore 64 back in 1984, I think it was. I spent liters of midnight oil studying Basic and even a bit of Machine Language, but progress has now outstripped my "learning curve". Nowadays, I simply want a computer to work for me, not the other way round. I keep saying that we are not yet in the computer age, yet — not when WE have to do all the hard thinking. Let's hope that Apple not only reads what we write here, but acts on it. "Computer, heal thyself!"

You said: "The files that caused the inability to backup via Time Machine was due

to another vendor's (Waldorf Largo and PPG Wave 3) software that I had

not updated recently. "

It would be very interesting to see, as an example, which files (paths) exactly have been responsible for your problem.

As I said in my last post on this subject, I do not think ordinary users of Mac computers (even experienced ones who are not in principle against some technicalities) should have to follow paths like fopsy describes, or perform elaborate procedures described by others in this string, in order to do routine backups. Computer users should be encouraged to do regular backups as routine security procedures, not discouraged by the need for extensive and technically complex procedures.

Today I installed the Supplemental Update to MacOS 10.14.3 and tried doing a Time Machine backup after turning my other backup software off in accordance with Bug Reporter advice. After c. 90 minutes, TM began backing up. After c. 3 hours it stopped backing up. The backup was once again incomplete.

I have again reported this to Bug Reporter, attaching a sysdiagnose file.

I also did a Carbon Copy Cloner backup. It took a little over an hour and is, to the best of my knowledge, complete. What is more, the resulting drive constitutes a bootable startup drive.

I

As I said in my last post on this subject, I do not think ordinary users of Mac computers (even experienced ones who are not in principle against some technicalities) should have to follow paths like fopsy describes, or perform elaborate procedures described by others in this string, in order to do routine backups. Computer users should be encouraged to do regular backups as standard security procedures, not be discouraged by the need for extensive and technically complex procedures.

Today I installed the Supplemental Update to MacOS 10.14.3 and tried doing a Time Machine backup after turning my other backup software off in accordance with Bug Reporter advice. After c. 90 minutes, TM began backing up. After c. 3 hours it stopped backing up. The backup was once again incomplete.

I have again reported this to Bug Reporter, attaching a sysdiagnose file.

I also did a Carbon Copy Cloner backup. It took a little over an hour and is, to the best of my knowledge, complete. What is more, the resulting drive constitutes a bootable startup drive.

I have had a disturbing thought. Could it be that all this stuff about Time Machine not making complete backups is a red herring? I am now puzzled and confused. According to the toolbar Time Machine icon after attempting yesterday's backup (see my post two posts back from this one), my last successful backup was made on 12 January, 2019. But today I started examining what actual files, etc., were backed up yesterday (8 February), and everything I looked for that had been modified or newly created since 12 January was correctly present in yesterday's backup.

This is obviously very far from a complete inventory of what was or was not backed up. But could it be that TM is, after all, backing everything up correctly, but showing misleading information in the toolbar icon? Have any of the more technicallly-adept posters in this string any actual evidence that material has not been backed up in the recent trials with TM in Mojave?

I agree. The whole purpose of Time Machine is to be as transparent and effortless as possible. It's not the be-all, end-all for backups. It's part of a comprehensive set of tools and practices to minimize the possibility of data loss.

I've resorted to leaving automatic backups off and gingerly hitting "back up now" after I've saved and closed everything (in case I have to reboot). I do it only when I remember and only when I have time, which defeats the purpose of Time Machine's reason for existing.

Hopefully Apple has some spare cycles to fix this, now that they've fixed the FaceTime bug.

This whole Time Machine mess-up is a pile of crap. Apple does some great things, but every so often they really screw up - TM being one of them. What kind of amateur in-house testing misses something this basic?

After spending hours going from one website to another and trying all the various 'fixes' others have suggested I was still sitting at ground zero. Since Mojave TM would fail time after time. So in frustration I downloaded Acronis True Image and it was amazing - the backup actually worked! Immediately, no fuss, no muss, no hassles. For me TM is fast disappearing in my rear-view mirror and I will not waste another minute messing with it!

I called it more-or-less that and Apple deleted my comment. So, I agree -- it is crap! The end-user is not supposed to be the quality-control guy. That sort of thing is supposed to be done in the factory.

The most ridiculous thing after I opened my ticket, is that they told me it's normal that TM target size grows as we backup since new data is coming in.

This is totally wrong as TM is using a mechanism called Snapshot. Guess what? Snapshot... what does that mean? it means that TM makes a picture of the disk state, and backs up this content. Why does it do a Snapshot? Because, and that's its only purpose, it avoids endless loop of backing up changing/growing data.

Since I told them it's a snapshot and the explanation is bull, I don't have any followup anymore.

Instead, they should admit there is a problem, and fix it.

Everybody can make mistakes and write buggy processes, especially on complex ones like TM. Every user is ready to behave and be nice to Apple if bugs are admitted and treated.

What is not working here, besides TM, is that stubborn attitude pretending the problem is on dumb users side not knowing how to use the software, or having screwed their systems by their sole responsibility.

The problem is on TM, not on the users.

I solved my TM problem.

The software ATI (Acronis True Image) has got a special feature called "Active Protection".

When you turn on this feature, two very strange files are created in /private/var/db:

-rw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 723223911544 Dec 31 10:28 atpstatdb00.db

-rw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 103115912776 Dec 31 10:28 atpstatdb14.db

Together they show a size of 769 GB.

But when I used sudo du -hs /private/var/db it showed only 6.4 GB.

In fact TM started with telling about 130 GB to backup.

But during backup TM increased this 130 GB more and more.

Obviously TM "thought" that these files had 769 GB or something like that.

I disabled the ATI "Active Protection" feature and deleted the two files.

After a reboot one of the two files have been recreated:

-rw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 812 Feb 14 21:53 atpstatdb00.db

But only with a size of 812 Byte.

After that the TM works as expected without any exclusions.

I came to this solution by creating more and more exclusions over the complete disc.

Then removing one by one until I found /private/var/db beeing the reason for the TM problem.

Frequently we have seen that TM doesn't interface well with other programs. Perhaps you have found a reason why. My Mac air is updated to Mohave and TM works perfectly. But, its a plain vanilla machine with no extra software and the external hard drive used exclusively for backups is still Journaled HFS+.

@speedolli

That did the trick for me. No need to actually turn Active Protection off or reboot.

Just add all the  atp* files from /private/var/db to the exclusion in TimeMachine and it works.

Thanks 1000 times.

But this shows how deeply TimeMachine in Mojave is screwed. Again, it uses rsnapshots, meaning it should not enter endless backups when things move, grow, shrink, appear, disappear. That's the goal of the snapshot. It's like taking a picture with friends and then complaining that one of the person on the picture has left the scene in real life. The picture doesn't change when people go back home! That's its goal. Just like a snapshot. TimeMachine backs up the snapshot, not the continuously changing actual disk state.

So again, Apple should fix TimeMachine.

Thanks but unfortunately, I don't have Acronis installed on my Mac thus, this answer doesn't work for me!

My last available Time machine is 3 months old! and I don't have any backup since Novembre...

Please Apple, work on it !

You have to do the same work as I did to find out which file is responsible on your machine:

Exclude everything from the root of your harddisc.

See if TM works now.

Then remove one directory by one from the exclusion list and everytime do a TM backup.

When TM fails, you have found the directory below which the "bad file" must be.

Then go into this directory and exclude everything.

Then remove one directory by one from the exclusion list and everytime do a TM backup.

When TM fails, you have found the subdirectory below which the "bad file" must be.

And so on....

It will probably take a few hours to find the "bad file(s)".

Please document here which one it was!

Jeepers creepers! All this crap is the responsibility of Apple. Not all of use are nerds, hello! Anyway, we have other things to do with our day. Just download SUPER DUPER and use that. Problem solved in five minutes.....