Mojave time machine back up failing

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.

/Users/Shared/adi that is in my Exclude list. I contacted support and it was handed off to the Engineers.

It seems Time Machine may have troubles with some unicode characters, and backup can take a long time.

I think it's better to stop the backup and exclude the folders.

Steve,

there is a working solution, add the folder to Time Machine Exclude list, look at my response from

Oct 6, 2018 12:01 PM.

Serge

I didn't encrypt but I need exclude those items as per others suggestions.

Try that and see if it doesn't help.

Hi Serge, Is the issue resolved in 10.14.1 which was released yesterday?

Your reply would be gratefully appreciated.

Thank you

Philip

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.

After "upgrade" to Mojave, Time Machine backups always fail. I have tried three different external USB hard drives, all freshly formatted with MacOS Extended (Journaled) file system. They were all different Seagate models. Multiple tries on each drive. Time Machine fails every time. Runs for a while then you get the notice "Backup Failed, Time Machine couldn't back up to <disk name>". Click on Details and it says "Time Machine couldn’t complete the backup to “<disk name>”, An error occurred while copying files. The problem may be temporary. If the problem persists, use Disk Utility to repair your backup disk.". This is clearly a bug in Mojave.

There are many bugs we can live with but this one is critical as it involves potential data loss, if we can't back up using Time Machine. Apple needs to fix this immediately! IMO Time Machine is one of the major benefits of using a Mac rather than Linux. Now they've broken it. Inexcusable that Mojave made it out the door without discovering this bug in testing. Also inexcusable that Apple is saying nothing about this, not even acknowledging it, in this their own forum.

Just got off the phone with Apple support. The Engineers had no real input other than telling me to remove certain Applications that I have installed like Transmission and HyperDock. They also suggested downloaded Malwarebytes and running a scan.

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.

I am extremely disappointed.

Same too me, i have three drives, all working correct for years, after the mojave update all are failing, i formatted one of them new, but the backup fails after a while.

In the console i have a lot of violations in the sandbox of about 100 files.

The question about the apple responsibility is attached because so many users spend their time, in my world this is called betatesting and it costs the company money.

I will test the idea of the case senstive formatting and give a feedback here.

But then the important question is, why only a few users and not all, cause case sensitive is rare i think.

I absolutely agree with you! It is a problem of the new Mojave operating system; Time Machine has always worked perfectly with macOS High Sierra updated to release 10.13.6.

In my case, the backup starts and runs correctly up to 18.56 GB on a total of about 50 GB. Then Time Machine crashes giving an error message with which it warns that there were problems in copying the files and also informing to try to use the "Disk Utility" for the repair. Even if you restart Time Machine, the backup still continues for a few hundred MB and then crashes again giving the same error message.

Now I am not able to find a possible solution to this "block" of TM.

I hope that "mom" Apple can intervene soon maybe with the release of the first update of Mojave.

Greetings from Italy…

I hope Google has translated my message correctly.

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. 😟