Mojave time machine back up failing

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.

Forget Apple's "screwed-up" TM -- there are better apps, such as SUPER DUPER, or CARBON CLONE, that actually work!

Use the About this Mac storage review function described above and look for the biggest (multiple GB) file. It is most likely to be that.

Could even be something like the imovie library.

I wonder how many of the reports of TM/Mojave problems are caused by TM wrongly reporting times, dates and sizes of backups?

My computer is a Mac mini with MacOS 10.14.2 and my backup drive is a Samsung 1 TB one, partitioned into two equal 500 GB partitions, one of which I use with Time Machine. It is Mac OS Extended (Journaled) formatted.

I last backed my HD up onto this backup drive relatively recently and my usage of the computer has been routine and modest (emails, a couple of small document downloads, etc.), so 'Preparing Backup…' should not have lasted long. Yesterday afternoon at about 15:35 I initiated a new TM backup, but, to discourage hold-ups, I deleted the 'in progress' file from my backup drive and allowed Spotlight to do a complete indexing first.

'Preparing Backup…' lasted about 5 hours. From about 22:30, TM began to show 'Backing up'. At 23:20 the amount to be backed up was shown as '3:80 GB of 6.93 GB' and remained unchanged thereafter; the time till completion was shown as about 40 minutes, but gradually increased over the hours. After about 5 hours, I stopped TM and disconnected the backup drive.

This morning I reconnected the drive and examined what had been backed up. I obviously could not examine every file, but as far as I could tell everything had been completely backed up and was up to date. There appeared to be no way of reliably ascertaining the time of completion, but it was probably before 23:20 last night, relatively soon after the start of 'Backing up'.

I conclude that in my system TM does eventually do a complete backup to a drive formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), that, however, it takes its time to start backing up after starting 'Preparing Backup…', and that it shows misleading information while backing up and even when backing up may already have been completed. Whether 3.80 GB or 6.93 GB or the difference, 3:13 GB, were not backed up I have not been able to ascertain, unfortunately.

I have updated my report in the Bug Reporter accordingly. I really think that that is the best place to report these problems and failures, because the Bug Reporter allows one — indeed, asks one — to attach a 'sysdiagnose' file containing a wealth of information about the inner workings of TM, generated while TM is working, by means of a Terminal code or a combination of key-strokes. I know that the Apple engineers read these reports, because when I first submitted a bug report about TM but failed to generate and attach a sysdiagnose file, the engineers replied within the Bug Reporter, asking me to repair my omission.

You definitely need an Apple Developer plan to report the bug.

It checks this beforehand and offers to subscribe. If you have a developper plan, then you can go further and post.

You also need to include a sys diagnostic zip file that takes about 10 minutes to be generated, otherwise, you can't post.

I just went through the entire process and used my developper account, not my personal one.

And submitted the details and tests, all hard disks tried (HP, Toshiba, Samsung, Seagate,WesternDigital), all of them formatted with each and every available format. I did actually attempt about 60 backups. All formats, all disks, all failed and grew forever until the disks were full.

We'll see whether we have an answer.

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.

Two or three posts earlier in this string, Kolrasten tells us he is 82 and is fed up with Time Machine not working as it should. I am 88 and have used Apple computers for 30 years for all common domestic purposes, for editing photos and for work as a composer — typesetting my musical scores — precisely because Apple's design philosophy used to be directed towards intuitively straightforward procedures for common tasks, leaving subtleties and intricacies to be explored and dug into to those who specialize in such things. I know highly intelligent and competent people of my generation who use their computers for correspondence, accounts, booking tickets and buying things online and do not even know what a browser is.

Backing up one's disk should be a routine procedure of such simplicity that one can get into the habit of doing it almost automatically while one gets on with more interesting tasks. To expect 90% of Mac users to have to go through what Fopsy describes is nonsense. Like Kolrasten, I have given up on Time Machine; I now use Carbon Copy Cloner, which does basically the same as SuperDuper, and, like the latter, does its job very simply and quickly and without being affected by other running applications. It is time for Apple to pull its socks up, stop trying to emulate other designers of computer systems in trying to make every possible refinement and option equally accessible in every system and application, and get back to making their own native apps — like Time Machine — just work.

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.....

This TM problem is beginning to be TS. But, just use a 3rd-party app such as SUPER DUPER, which can also be used to create a perfect OS X clone on a disk or hardrive.

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.)

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.

10.14.3 doesn't change anything.

Still growing up forever.

Got an answer from Apple though, after using BugReport. They told me to run a TimeMachine diagnostic command while the symptoms occur. At least that shows that they read the bug reports and don't ignore problems... yet.

But then they said it's normal it's growing up as new data is written to the hard disk.

This is totally wrong: TimeMachine is using RSnapshot. As the name tells it, it makes a snapshot of the disk and backups up this image. This is to avoid endless backup while data is dynamic. It's actually the exact opposite of what they say.

So I submitted the new diagnosis files. We'll see.

Again I invested a day of work into this Apple bug in MacOS 10.14.3.

1) Erased the external USB volume with the following file system:

Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) and renamed the volume.

2) Disabled Security: csrutil disable

3) Disabled Spotlight:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

+

sudo mdutil -a -i off

4) Started the initial backup

--> The backup should have been stoped after 181 GB.

But TM took hours and almost filled the 1TB volume completely.

No more incremental backups possible.

TM almost useless.

I created an official Bug Report with tmdiagnostic attachment.

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 thought all was well with my Case Sensitive drive. Completed multiple Time Machine backups up till today. Now it's locking up again when Time Machine attempts a back up.

I turned off Time Machine. I have at least one good TM backup, so I'll rely on my documents backing up to iCloud (not sure how much I should trust any of it right now).

As we enter 2019, it is amazing how Apple has become the case study of a "company in trouble" (plummeting stock, questionable product strategy, struggling sales, buggy software). Some of it is because Apple is an easy target, but this experience has made me question my confidence in the company as well.

What makes me feel worse about this is that my support case with Apple was dismissed as being Western Digital's problem. I think their view of these threads is that its a place for whiners to hang out and complain about their self-inflicted problems -- which may be a little true :) -- but they refuse to acknowledge that if there are multiple people reporting similar issues, maybe, just maybe, it's actually something that requires Apple to look into.