Mojave time machine back up failing

This matches my experience. The HDD in the Time Capsule is formatted as case sensitive. When I formatted my external Thunderbolt HDD as Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) it worked too. Be aware that there are others reporting issues about Time Machine running out of space even with the reformatted external drive, but the reformatted drive workaround worked for me and I've seen no subsequent errors. I also verified with a second external drive that the SuperDuper! backup program works perfectly well with Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) so I am confident that I have a reliable backup system in place until Apple figures out what is going on. There is absolutely no downside of formatting a disk that is dedicated for backup use with Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled). You can leave it that way forever regardless of Apple's eventual fix.

I also did not have App Cleaner & Uninstaller installed. If a misbehaved app is able to break Time Machine this could turn into a whack-a-mole situation.

I have carefully executed all the instructions listed in the nektony.com link recommended by s.od.

Everything went OK. Finally fixed the problem of the "block" of Time Machine with Mojave installed.

A heartfelt thanks to me goes to the developer Serge (s.od) who wanted to provide the best instructions for solving the problem.

Same here. Mojave automatically converted my hard drive to APFS without any prompts. Now TM wants to erase the external HD data every time I try a backup and converts the external HD from APFS to extended journaled. Not sure why, but I get about 90% backed up and it fails. I get the take two pills and call me in the morning routine from Apple. Still waiting on the next solution, but I paid $49 for Acronis. Running a VM and need everything backed up!

The external disk that holds your Time Machine backups cannot be formatted with APFS to work with Time Machine. If you are able to erase your external disk that is used for Time Machine I suggest formatting the partition used with Time Machine as Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) if you want it to work with Time Machine. Your Mac (boot) hard drive can stay with APFS, no problem. The Time Machine backup disk format does not have to match the format used by your Mac OS disk. It's only used for storage. I'm surprised that Mojave would convert an external hard drive that's currently being used for Time Machine to APFS. strange. I totally agree with your strategy of having two independent backup solutions but I think you can get Time Machine working again.

Thanks to this thread, I fixed my problem. I excluded the App-Cleaner files from my library/containers folder and reformatted the external hard drive to Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled).

Now life is good.

However I am ****** that AppleCare support didn't return my 6 VM nor several EM over the weekend.

🙂

All of your with a Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) disk... do you actually use the Encrypt option?

That's the only difference I have form all successful persons here. Nobody talks about the encryption.

Just Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) still causes my problem of endless TM growing backup until the disk is full.

Thanks

I have never used the encryption option. The initial backup was about 550 GB on a 2 TB drive. The hourly incremental backups are fairly small and I still have 1.43 TB free on my backup disk. If it is going to run out of space it will take quite a while, like several months. By design, Time Machine should delete the oldest backups to make room for the newest. Note that I don't have the Uninstaller app that other people are excluding/removing on my Mac. The uncontrolled growth issue sounds like another Time Machine bug. Hopefully, Apple will fix all these bugs sometime soon.

I got my full backup!! Format on the external HD extended case sensitive and just excluded App Cleaner and Uninstaller. Hats off to all the third party vendors trying to keep up with all the changes. IT'S NOT EASY. Love the app!!

I have an issue backing up an external drive of 1tb through my Mac over wi-fi to a 2tb Time Capsule. Gets to about half way through and hangs. Then my Mac freezes on restart. Does this sound related? Or a different issue?

Not sure if its Mojave or not as I added the external drive only a few days after upgrading to Mojave.

Thanks

Dan

Ok I gave it a try without encrypting the disk in MacOS Extended, Journaled, Case Sensitive

Still the same problem. 1TB is not enough to backup 180Gb... keeps going as soon as it comes close to 170Gb...

How stupid.

Hello Serge, just deleting the version 5.4 folder works fine as well and you don't have to exclude the version 6 one from your Time Machine backups.

PS : Out of the subject of this discussion, your App-Cleaner-Helper app is strangely named in Activity Monitor : $(PRODUCT_NAME). Nothing problematic I guess but quite unusual to be mentioned.

Thanks

Alex

Hi Alex,

Thank you for the confirmation.

Yes, this approach works as well.

In short, if you had App Cleaner 5.4 and then launched App Cleaner 6.0 there two service folders were created.

The folders look like having identical names, in fact they are different, the folder's names contain correct unicode characters.

Time Machine may not create a backup when it finds such two folders.

So, for new thread readers, there are two ways to resolve such an issue:

- add the "~/Library/Containers/com.nektony.App-Cleaner" folder to the Time Machine exclude list, there is the instruction: https://nektony.com/mac-app-cleaner/troubleshooting

- or remove the "~/Library/Containers/com.nektony.App-Cleaner" folder in Finder. This solution is more reliable, and it is recommended if you use different backup software, such us Carbon Copy Cloner.

Thank you for sharing your experience and helper issue report .

Serge

I have the same issue, and i don't know about that and today i go and get new hdd for my backup and i have still same problem and the worst thing is , apple going to change my mbp 2018 15''İ9 with the new one coz of "speaker cracking problem " and tmr the cargo company come and get my macbook pro from me and i have to backup my files right now.Whats going on man !!! SHAME ON YOU APPLE!!!!

Happy to report my failing Time Machine Issues were resolved because of this thread. I indeed had App Cleaner and updated it on 2 separate MacBook Pros and the T M Backups for each broke around that time. Thank you Serge for providing the info on this forum and Nektony has a great page which Serge has linked that explains how to work around the issue until the fix is released. Bugs happen and I've enjoyed using App Cleaner on multiple Macs with no issues until now. It's great to see the Developer proactive and responding to issues like this and sounds like a fix is already completed and under review in the App Store.

Some helpful information I learned while troubleshooting this problem:

- As of macOS Sierra I believe, Time Machine (and likely other macOS apps) use Unified Logging, which combines memory and data stores to store log information, it's no longer stored in flat log files. backup - How to view time machine log in MacOS Sierra? - Super User

You can use the log utility to view Time Machine backup information with the following command:

log show --style syslog --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --info

That is how I found the exact file that was tripping up my T M Backup. The error the log utility showed from running that command was this:

2018-10-13 17:23:57.595563-0500  localhost backupd[21603]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:TMLogError] Error: (-48) SrcErr:NO Copying /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/Chris’s MacBook Pro/2018-10-13-144347/Macintosh HD/Users/Chris/Library/Containers/com.nektony.App-Cleaner/Data/Library/Application Support/App Cleaner & Uninstaller to /Volumes/Untitled/Backups.backupdb/Chris’s MacBook Pro/2018-10-13-144348.inProgress/59C53699-29D8-429F-AFBF-8C6E4B92EC5A/Macintosh HD/Users/Chris/Library/Containers/com.nektony.App-Cleaner/Data/Library/Application Support
2018-10-13 17:23:57.595722-0500  localhost backupd[21603]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:TMLogError] Stopping backup.
2018-10-13 17:23:57.595839-0500  localhost backupd[21603]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:TMLogError] Error: (-8062) SrcErr:NO Copying /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/Chris’s MacBook Pro/2018-10-13-144347/Macintosh HD/Users/Chris/Library/Containers/com.nektony.App-Cleaner/Data/Library/Application Support/App Cleaner & Uninstaller/auth.cer to /Volumes/Untitled/Backups.backupdb/Chris’s MacBook Pro/2018-10-13-144348.inProgress/59C53699-29D8-429F-AFBF-8C6E4B92EC5A/Macintosh HD/Users/Chris/Library/Containers/com.nektony.App-Cleaner/Data/Library/Application Support
2018-10-13 17:23:58.509247-0500  localhost backupd[21603]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:TMLogInfo] Copied 2231121 items (116.33 GB) from volume Macintosh HD. Linked 0.
2018-10-13 17:23:58.527043-0500  localhost backupd[21603]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:TMLogError] Copy stage failed with error:11
2018-10-13 17:23:58.821564-0500  localhost backupd[21603]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:TMLogInfo] Unmounted local snapshot: com.apple.TimeMachine.2018-10-13-144347 at path: /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/Chris’s MacBook Pro/2018-10-13-144347/Macintosh HD source: Macintosh HD
2018-10-13 17:23:58.828114-0500  localhost backupd[21603]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:TMLogError] Backup failed with error 11: 11

- As previously mentioned, Nektony provided a great workaround page here: https://nektony.com/mac-app-cleaner/troubleshooting. One thing to note is that the 2nd option of deleting BOTH the "App Cleaner & Uninstaller" folders inside "~/Library/Containers/com.nekony.App-Cleaner/Data/Library/Application Support" seems to be fine. When the App Cleaner app is relaunched, it creates a new "App Cleaner & Uninstaller" directory there. I would think that is the preferable route, since it requires no special exclusion from the Time Machine Backup. I tried both methods they listed on different machines and each resulted in successful T M Backups thereafter.

Hope this info helps the next person not have to spend so many hours trying to figure out the issue. Thanks to Marissa from Apple Tech Support who found this thread for me and helped me get to the bottom so I could once again backup my machines with App Cleaner 6.0.

Peter,

The Containers folder is in the Library folder under your User's home directory. Are you sure you are not looking in the System Library folder?

There is a difference between this: /Library

And this: ~/Library

There is no Containers folder in the system Library folder found at "/Library".

CDMBPro:~ cdowney$ ls /Library/ | grep Containers
CDMBPro:~ cdowney$ ls ~/Library/ | grep Containers
Containers
Group Containers
CDMBPro:~ cdowney$

~ denotes you are in your User's home directory, which fully qualified would be equivalent to "/Users/<YOUR_USERNAME>". The fully qualified path of the 2 App Cleaner folders to clear out would be:

"/Users/<YOUR_USERNAME>/Library/Containers/com.nektony.App-Cleaner/Data/Library/ Application\ Support/"

-Chris