Mojave time machine back up failing

Like so many people, I am having Time Machine trouble. I am afraid a great deal of this thread is beyond my technical knowledge, but I am concerned (as I have already said in earlier posts in this thread) about the formatting of the drive (strictly, the partition of the drive) I am trying to back up to. At the moment It is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), but I have seen suggestions that it should be APFS. The document reached by the link below seems to suggest HFS+.

I have found this statement: 'Important: You can back up from an HFS+ or APFS-formatted disk to an HFS+ disk; however, Time Machine can’t back up to an APFS-formatted disk. If you select a back up disk formatted as APFS, Time Machine offers to reformat it as HFS+.' (my italics). It comes from https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/types-of-disks-you-can-use-with-time-machine-mh15139/mac. I should welcome comments, including any about case-sensitive formatting.

To show willing, I posted a simple description of the TM problem in the Bug Reporter, https://idmsa.apple.com/IDMSWebAuth/login.html?appIdKey=77e2a60d4bdfa6b7311c854a56505800be3c24e3a27a670098ff61b69fc5214b&sslEnabled=true&rv=3a, a couple of weeks ago and updated it just now, adding a sysdiagnose file as requested by the Apple engineers (this facility being the especial advantage of the Bug Reporter). Earlier today I also posted a description in https://www.apple.com/feedback/timemachine.html. Please, everyone affected by the TM difficulties, post in both these places and thus apply a little pressure on the Apple engineers. Strength in numbers!

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?

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

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+.

Not quite sure what you mean, I have 1TB hard drive and a 2TB time machine is plenty. How big is your main drive? Or are you trying to backup the main drive and all attached and networked drives on one TM schedule?

Might be worth posting in the Apple Bug Reporter, too. They don't reply there, either, but they do read posts.

Please try making another backup and let us know how it went.

Thanks

Updated to 10.14.3 yesterday and turned on Time Machine. So far, no freezing. I'm hopeful...

After I set Filesystem Protections: disabled

the backup was very slow, but after about 4 hours it suddenly speeded up.

The idea of "Filesystem Protections: disabled" did not change anything:

TM still came into the "endless growing" situation.

Now I see errors like this:

2018-12-31 18:22:51.067749+0100 localhost backupd-helper[104]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:TMLogError]

Failed to remove '/Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/Ollis MacBook Air/2018-12-30-083856/Macintosh HD/.MobileBackups.trash',

error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=642 "You can’t save the file “.MobileBackups.trash” because the volume “Macintosh HD@snap-97108” is read only."

UserInfo={NSFilePath=/Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/Ollis MacBook Air/2018-12-30-083856/Macintosh HD/.MobileBackups.trash, NSUserStringVariant=(

I switched back to

# csrutil status

System Integrity Protection status: enabled.

Then started a TM backup. Now I am back to this kind of error messages:

2019-01-01 16:32:13.564064+0100 localhost backupd[2174]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:TMLogError]

Failed to remove attribute 'com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeLastFSEventID' from 'file:///',

error: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=1 "Operation not permitted"

Still the problem of "endless growth" persists.

:-(

I have no more ideas what to test and I am waiting for an Apple bug fix desperately.

Now I submitted a feedback on

https://www.apple.com/feedback/timemachine.html

and I got:

Thank you for your feedback on the Time Capsule.

We cannot respond to you personally, but please know that your

message has been received and will be reviewed by the Time Capsule Team.

If we need to follow up with you on your ideas for improving the Time

Capsule, we will contact you directly.

We appreciate your assistance in making the Time Capsule better.

Time Capsule Team

Apple

So wait and see ......

I submitted feedback as well. Hopefully there is a Time Machine team that's reading it. I thought they disbanded the Time Capsule team that the feedback form referred to, but that may explain why this problem still exists.

It looks like you need a Developer's account to access the Apple Bug Reporter?

No, you don't need a Developer's account, rtm808. As far as i remember, I just had to use my Apple ID and password — same as you need to post in these Discussion pages. I have posted a number of different bugs in the Bug Reporter in the last year or two, and I certainly am no Developer or pundit of any kind.

I have a 2018 MacBook Pro with the same TM problems. The same error message and the same attempts to resolve it with no resolution. I bought a new LaCie 2 TB drive and TM has never worked on it to do an entire backup.