Mojave time machine back up failing

Even if you just partition a small portion of your drive it will at least give you some room to back up your mac. You don't have to erase your whole drive. Just a partition big enough to get you through until this bug is fixed. 😉 When they fix the issue, erase the partition and your back to the way things were. Easy peasy.

And what is the utility of the beta version, of the engineers that are paid to produce and test the product? If a car constructor, a writer... give you a draft with some bugs (failing brakes, lacking paragraphs), you will hold the same speech?

TimeMachine is not a gadget for most users, it's a useful tool, it's a strenght to MacOS.

And yet since the beginnings of software development, there will always be bugs that slip thru the cracks, always. This is nothing new. It is, what it is. I guess I still have a lot to learn about the internet and forums. I spent hours with apple care working on this issue. It is important. But i also take responsibility for my hasty and stupid decision to jump aboard a brand new os thinking it was going to be bug free. It is a gamble, anyone that's been around long enough knows this. Betas find most problems, but not all. You can not be that naive to think a gm release would be or even should be bug free. They never have and probably never will. Its almost impossible and impracticle to expect as much from a fresh software releases. Glad there is a work around. Now life moves on.

Hello, I've launched this command to inspect TM logs.

log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info --last 30

Find that the error was linked to "App Cleaner && Uninstall" library folder that contains the "?" character. So TM/Macos can't find the correct path and throw error while saving backup.

==> I don't understand why an app editor name his app folder this way... Specials chars in file/folder are highly discouraged.

I removed/uninstall "App Cleaner & Uninstall", delete .inProgress file in the TM folder, restart TM backup and all worked fine.

Hope this can help.

As said, I did convert the disk to Journaled Extended CaseSensitive

But the problem now is that things are so slow it's barely usable.

I let mine turn overnight, it backed up 11Gb. Still 170 to go. And it says it will take more than 2 days!

Just like the good USB1 times...

Not usable.

Hi, I think there are some workaround to get macOS Mojave TM to work, but also I think that Apple really SHOULD investigate all those problems.

I don't think macOS Mojave TM is very stable. Can't understand how such a critical macOS functionality could be released without more attention & tests.

Interesting because I have this application. macOS makes it near impossible to remove application data but the app has never caused issues before. I also cannot find the folder with the ? you are referring to resides.

Hello, the folder was in /Library/Containers/com.nektony.App-Cleaner/Data/Library/Application Support/App Cleaner & Uninstal

The error reported by TM was

2018-10-05 19:03:16.731350+0200 0xbdf38    Error       0x0                  4042   0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:TMLogError] Error: (-48) SrcErr:NO Copying /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/iMac de Yann/2018-10-05-165601/Macintosh HD/Users/tigrou/Library/Containers/com.nektony.App-Cleaner/Data/Library/Application Support/App Cleaner & Uninstal ler to /Volumes/timemachine/Backups.backupdb/iMac de Yann/2018-10-05-165602.inProgress/E9EAED7D-3CAC-47DE-AFB4-1F6108684730/Macintosh HD/Users/tigrou/Library/Containers/com.nektony.App-Cleaner/Data/Library/Application Support

Look at how in error the problematic folder is shown (the space in word "Uninstaller") : .../Application Support/App Cleaner & Uninstal ler

This is because the "real" folder name on the disk is ".../Application Support/App Cleaner & Uninstal?ler"

Hummmm... I just tried to install again "App Cleaner & Uninstaller", then run a new TM backup.

TM complete without error...

So, this is not ONLY the "?" in the path that caused the problem. I think the problem is because of 2 folders with "similar names" :

1) App Cleaner & Uninstaller

2) App Cleaner & Uninstal?ler

I believe TM was screwed up with those two folders and their names.

So for those who use "App Cleaner & Uninstaller", I recommend to completely uninstall this software (ie: In app folder and in ~/Library/Containers/com.nektony.App-Cleaner and then install this software again.

In my case, this solved issue with TM.

What is odd is that it didn't happen to me until over week passed since I clean installed Mojave. Maybe thats why it didn't get picked up during the betas. Also, most people probably didn't bother with time machine during the beta because they were just fiddling around with it on a separate partition. no reason to back-up a beta. I dunno. just a hunch.

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.

I also use this app, and TM never had a problem to work.

But anyway how the breaking space will come to the problem, a mistake every programmer knows, inside the TM routine should be an expression which solve errors like that, even UTF8 or things like that.

It is not understandable and we will see how long it takes until mojave will work proper.

Its our mistake at all, never change a running system and never jump to an update X.X always wait until X.X.3 or 4, thats what i did in the last 10 years, but my machine had a problem that it gets the spinning wheel all the time and i hoped the update will fix it.

It dosn't, now the wheel is all 30 seconds :-(

I hear ya. By chance maybe you should try a clean install, if you have not already. When i did a blanket update of mojave, it was kind glitchy in various areas. then i performed this method in the link below and lt has been buttery smooth ever since. (except for time machine bug) https://wccftech.com/clean-install-macos-mojave-ota/

But then you loosing all data at all, you have to have a working backup better two or so, because dataloss is worst, AND all users with Fusiondrive cannot easely make a Cleaninstall, cause the Fusiondrive is not deletable. ;-)

Not that easy.

And Apple has no handout what to do exactly!

You need help from the net to work over the terminal.

And there is no Garantie that the spinning wheel will not come again.

I dont know what you are doing on your machine, but mine is pretty full of stuff which i need to work with.

At he end thats always just little things which are creating this problems, never big ons, because the will be find easely

The method I linked in my previous post never deleted my data. It is a recovery method. Obviously I would make sure you have a valid back up before you do it. but I never needed my time machine drive connected or any backup data and everything was exactly the way I left it after the clean install. Not one single thing needed to be set up with this method. 😉

Side note - I deleted that app "App Cleaner & Uninstaller" and tried backing up with with a freshly formatted time machine partition set to journaled case-insesitive and it failed again. Only work around for me right now is case-senstive format. 😟