Mojave time machine back up failing

Same thing! I just made a topic about it on here and Reddit and everyone seems to think its a problem with my drive despite knowing for a fact that my drive is perfect and this issue only started after upgrading to Mojave!

I also tried deleting the "inprogress" file including the trash file which takes a while. I then unchecked daily backups in the System Preferences for Time Machine as well. After a restart of my MacBook Pro the ensuing backup ended with the same "Time Machine Failed" message. Disk utility indicates the Backup volume is good. Finder shows the last backup folder is dated Sep 27 at 6:30 PM which is shortly before I installed Mojave. Nothing shows since then in Finder but files do show up when I enter Time Machine for files created after that date and time. Something is really screwed up.

I may have to try an alternative backup system but will wait a while. Time Machine has been good to me. Last year I upgraded my Mac Mini with a 500 GB SSD and restored the Sierra OS to the new drive with Time Machine. It went very smoothy with no hitches. It now runs High Sierra with no problems. I need the Mac Mini for my Hi Def music that is connected to a high end audio/video system with a supplemental app that makes iTunes just a file system for my music downloads in Flac or Alac. Fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, there is no Mojave option for the Mini so I don't have another Mac to see if the problem can be replicated.

I digress but am happy I have an alternative OS to fall back on, a Chromebook. I will not say any more about it as I am getting way off the subject.

Apple has been unable to identify the problem or offer a solution that worked from my time with them on Twitter. I'm going to tell my support rep to escalate this to an engineer so that someone actually know about this and it can get fixed.

I have been raising **** on Reddit and hopefully someone will notice that this issue isn't isolated to me or a result of my specific config.

Sorry I didn't see this post and I started another one. I have the same problem with Time Machine. I even replaced the HDD in my Lacie 4TB external Thunderbolt drive as it was around 4 years old. Backups still fail. I tried a new external disk and yes the same problem. The backups start OK but around half way through a 400GB backup data transfer slows and eventually throws up the error message. No issues under High Sierra.

Yes,

In previous versions, the problem of the ever growing backup (endless) was fixed by excluding the directory where it stored its work files.

Adding /Users/Shared/adi to the exclude list was enough.

It looks like TimeMachine is not using that folder anymore, but stores that always growing data somewhere else, triggering the problem: as TimeMachine moves on, the total size of data to be backed up grows with it until it reaches a full disk, no matter what disk size you have.

Too bad.

Same thing. With my MPB 2018 and an external HD, and with my iMac 2017 with its own HD. Few days after the upgrading from High Sierra to Mojave, and even an entire, clean, reinstall of macOS Mojave. Apple, correct this ASAP.

I called Apple support and spoke with a Senior Technician and informed them about your /shared/adi discovery. They took note and said it made sense in context. They will be looking into it and they are having me run a backup while logging the necessary data from me to send to them.

Hopefully they will be able to confirm if this is in fact the issue or not and be able to push a supplemental update to fix this soon

I spoke with a technician and they had me set up another user profile. When I did this and tried to back it up again it did the same thing. The other interesting thing is the same external hard drive did work on another computer using Mojave. The only different thing I did with the two computers when I downloaded Mojave was one used a hardwire and one used a WiFi. I can’t imagine this would make a difference.

Does it ever stop? The only real error message is that there is no room left on the backup device.

You can check the status over the backup process.

For example, mine says "23Gb out of 258Gb" and when you near 250Gb then both values grow:

251Gb out of 263Gb

252Gb out of 265Gb

etc...

yes it stopped

It displayed increasingly up to 96.. out of 104... (cant remember was it GB or was it MB?) then said it was finished. It has run ok a few times now. On high Sierra until a few days ago. It must have backedup the new system ok which is big.

I got patchy response when I clicked on the RH date line but that's another problem I guess. Still exploring that one.