Mojave time machine back up failing

It looks as if those who are affected by the loss of TM will have to wait for version 10.14.1 for a fix. In my ten years of using a Mac, any bugs had to wait for a newer version to be corrected with the exception of gross security lapses such as the root password fiasco.

For better or worse I decided to use Google Drive a while ago as another backup medium for my photos, music and document folders. Part of the choice was simply because I use an Android phone and also use a Chromebook. I am not planning on leaving Apple but prefer the Chromebook for many portable uses and it syncs well with the Chrome browser on my two Macs.

Nothing beats Time Machine for easy and up until now, reliable backups. I hope the fix is sooner than later.

What happens if you don’t give up? The time remaining estimates are adjusted dynamically and can change radically. It would be interesting to know if the process would complete if allowed to run to completion, or failure. FWIW the Apple Time Capsule uses case sensitive format for the integrated disk. Even when I could not get any of my USB3 or Thunderbolt direct connected drives to work with Time Machine the Time Capsule still worked. Oh, SuperDuper! worked fine with the same drives that failed with Time Machine.

If you contact Apple support they will assume the problem is with your external drives. You’ll have to keep pressing them to consider that Time Machine software is possibly at fault. I don’t think they monitor user forums but I copy & pasted this discussion to the chat thread I had with a senior Apple advisor. I have no feelings either way that Apple is even looking at this issue with any level of concern.

I’m pretty obsessed about Time Machine because it has totally saved my bacon on several occasions. Knowing that my safety net is compromised is very disturbing.

Like another said in this thread, the work-around for this appears to be formating your time machine drive to case sensitive format. Once I did this, all my back ups are now successfully completed. obviously this still needs to be addressed, but for now there is a way to back up your data with time machine. I do wish more people would read through the posts instead of inserting so much mindless cannon fodder. But here is to wishing. You know what they say...

Didn't you install "App cleaner & uninstaller" recently, says this week ? :-)

I can't remember, but recently I got a notification on an update... I think problems occurred since App Cleaner update.

Maybe, this update created the second folder with same name but add a "?" in it...

My TM didn't complete with error since the 4 of October this week.

Like I mentioned earlier, the case sensitive workaround is masking an underlying issue that Apple still needs to address. The good news is that formatting your Time Machine backup drives as case sensitive should have no negative side effects since the disk that Apple uses in the Time Capsule version of their Airport product comes formatted this way. So even when Apple fixes the underlying issue you can continue using your case sensitive formatted Time Machine backup disks.

Note that the format of your Time Machine backup disks do not have to match the format of your Mac's operating system disks. Your Mac can be using any supported format, e.g., APFS, Mac OS Extended (Journaled), etc., and still back up to a Time Machine disk formatted in any of the supported formats that Time Machine works with. By the way, Time Machine backup disks cannot use APFS.

In a perfect world all disks would be formatted case sensitive. It is more secure and logically correct. Unfortunately some legacy operating systems were only case insensitive and programmers took advantage of this sloppiness allowed by those old operating systems. There are some very large applications, for example some of Adobe's, that break if you try to run them on a case sensitive drive. These apps probably have a lot of legacy code in them and the developer doesn't want to clean it up because it's still working. But since you're not running applications on your Time Machine disks, using case sensitivity fro Time Machine is not a problem. Time Machine disks are simply used for storage and all of the disk formats supported by Time Machine are fully "case preserving" which means they will never change the name of a file even if the case insensitive file system doesn't care.

In any case, Time Machine was designed to work with case sensitive and case insensitive formatted drives. There is currently a bug in Time Machine that is masked when case sensitive formatting is used on the backup drive. From reading this forum it sounds like there may be other things like the name of an App Cleaner & Uninstaller file that is triggering the bug. But deleting that app is not a fix either, it's simply avoiding a condition that causes Time Machine to fail when it should either tolerate the file naming error or flag it. Time Machine should be resilient to such user/app induced anomalies and not fail the entire backup process.

Finally, others have mentioned deleting the "inprogress" container from the Time Machine backup disk. At least on my machine, I am not able to delete this container. It gets marked for deletion and moved to the trash bin, but I cannot remove it from the trash bin even with admin privileges. This container stays in the trash bin forever until I reformat the Time Machine backup disk, which means it is still on the Time Machine disk. Not sure if this matters, but it's another piece of information for the Apple engineers to consider.

How many of you have filed a but report with Apple ? Feedback - macOS - Apple

Applecare just tried to fob me off saying I must have a malware (on a clean install!) and said "it cant possible be a bug in our software!".

Not impressed.

Essentially nothing. Was hoping for acknowledgement of the issue and being told that it would be addressed in a future update.

I encourage all with this issue to contact Apple support and get them really investigating this and not just writing it off to 3rd party programs.

you're not overly surprised are you? Never like Apple not to acknowledge something...oh wait they've been doing that for twenty year. Seem to be worse at it last few years though...blame something else, third parties, the user if you need to, deflect, avoid, obfuscate because why ever would you track issues on your own forums or think if thousands of people are reporting similar experiences there was a problem?

Since I installed Mojave, Time machine is stuck.

Tried everything written here, but nothing works...

APPLE: instead of offering new softwares every 6 months, please take care of your customers and solve this problem !

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've been having this problem recently, think it started when I updated to 10.14.2. Just updated to 10.14.3, and I managed to complete a manually initiated backup successfully, although it did insist on doing a complete backup (took a couple of hours). So I think the latest update has fixed the bugs (fingers crossed)?

Alex

It work for a couple of days. Backups were being made and completed. Tonight, it locked up again in the middle of a backup. Cursor moves and iTunes continued playing music, but everything else is frozen.

Letting it sit to see if it "unfreezes" itself. Had to switch to my backup computer...it's sad to need more than one, just in case the Mac locks up.

This appears to be due to the new security mechanism in Mojave & I have been able to 'fix' it on my machine.

There are many posts on the web that describe booting into safe mode and using a command to turn off the new mechanism. I did not do that, but rather used a brute force method. In hindsight, I probably should have tried it...

In Time Machine, under Options, you can exclude things. There are four folders in the main HD on my mac. I excluded the contents of each, not by adding the top level folder, but by including those directly under them.

For example, instead of putting /Library in there, I put /Library⁩/Application Support⁩ and all of its siblings. Then I did the same for the other three folders.

Then, I removed the items in the exclude list one at a time. It took a while, but I found those places that were causing the problems and either updated their permissions or kept them in the exclude list until the end and then changed the assigned permissions.

Note that there were a few times that I needed to go one level deeper. That only happened on a couple of folders, though.

Also, some of the permissions changes needed were made obvious by the exclude list in that some folders had list red circles with negative signs. I made it to that I had read access to those & that problem was solved very easily.

It turns out that the fault isn't Apple's, or at least not completely. 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 seems the clash between Mojave expectations and that software's *something* caused the failure.

So, updating that software in addition to what is described above resulted in my being able to perform full back ups with no problem.

Total time spent was about 3 hours, but it works now.

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!

@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.