Mojave time machine back up failing

Hi,

you're absolutely right !

By the way, I've remove the .inProgress container from trash bin with success and from finder with admin privileges.

1 - Open Trash in finder

2 - rename (don't know why..) the container

3 - Right click (click + control) on the container

4 - Select "remove immediately..." (note: In French this is "Supprimer immédiatement...", I don't know the right name of this option in English)

If you follow those steps, you can remove .inProgress containers that reside in trash bin.

Select the disk you just formatted as the backup disk in Time Machine preferences and let it run. It will start automatically in a few minutes or you can tell it to start immediately by selecting "Back Up Now" in the menu.

Interesting, I went to that folder and found 2 folders with the same name, but neither of them had a ? in the name.

They did however have seemingly the same name. And for standard HFS+, two folders with the same name in the same parent folder would cause an issue. But going case sensitive worked for me.

yd290276's discovery about Nektony's App Cleaner solution for the Time Machine failure works for me as well. Someone, maybe I will contact Nektony about the issue so they can correct whatever the problem is, likely with their updates. Thanks again for a solution that solves my problem with Time Machine.

This is odd for so many reasons.

From other posts it sounds like one of the "duplicate" folders shown in Finder actually has a non-displayable (from Finder's perspective) character appended to the folder name that is visible from the terminal. However, this has nothing to do with case sensitivity. Case sensitivity only deals with file/folder names that differ only in case. For example, without case sensitivity all lower case and upper case variations of the file "dog.txt" are considered the same file, e.g. "dog.txt", "Dog.txt", "dOg.txT" and so on. If you try to overwrite "dog.txt" with any case variation of that name the file system should intervene and warn you that you are trying to overwrite an existing file and give you options like cancel, replace, or copy (where it will append something to the file name like "dog.txt (1)" to ensure no duplicates exist. With case sensitivity ON you can have all case variations of the file "dog.txt" and each one is a separate and unique file. Case sensitivity is usually the preferred option for all text strings and manipulations, but Mac OS diverged from its Unix roots to support case insensitivity, for reasons unknown. This allowed the proliferation of apps that count on case insensitivity to operate correctly.

In any case, if the duplicate folder shown in Finder has an extra non-displayable character it should be treated as a different folder name regardless of case sensitivity. The folder name length would be different, so the names could not be equivalent from a string comparison standpoint unless the extra character is treated in some special way. If there is an illegal character in the second folder name the file system should never have allowed the folder to be created in the first place. Since the differences are not case related, it presents no obvious reason why a case sensitive file system works and a case insensitive file system does not.

I am having the same problem with Time Machine and my new external hard drive. Last night I tried using my AirPort Time Capsule, and it worked fine (took forever).

So I've concluded that its an external hard drive issue with Mojave and needs attention!

Ok,

I did the reformat thing, etc.. launched a new TM backup.

Failed: not enough space.

Again.

So obviously for me, the case sensitive journaled extended format doesn't help at all.

It had to backup just 180Gb and filled the 1Tb disk. When reaching 170GB, then the total volume of data to backup started to grow from 180Gb as the backup processed, until it reached 1Tb and stopped.

Now I spent too much time with this and wait for an official fix from Apple.

Steve J

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!

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 don't have Mac-App-Cleaner or anything similar. I raised a bug report on Apple feedback page, but I dont think i will get a reply.

I suggest everyone who has this issue reports it. Feedback - Time Machine - Apple

Same... I've reformatted, repaired, repeat.... I finally found this post, and crossing my fingers that the exclusion of the appcleaner folder will work. Also.. .I tried 2 different drives, same result.

I installed App Cleaner Pro as a trial a little while ago. I decided, however, that I did not need it at that time and uninstalled it (using its free near-double, AppCleaner.app, to do so). I have now used 'Find Ant File', an application that searches for and finds everything on one's hard drive, even invisibles, to find anything whose name contains 'App Cleaner Pro'. It found one or two left-over items, and I have deleted those, too. But Time Machine still does not work.

Or Mac (since Mojave) isn't compatible with Western Digital. If WD has been working with Mac for decades why does Apple think it's WD? Wonder if it's the APFS file system. You might have demonstrated that by having reformatted your drive in the older Mac OS Extended.

I installed Mojave 10.14.2 on a MacBook Airbook mid 2013. Using WD 1 TB external HD formatted with Mac journaled (but NOT case sensitive). No problems with TM for 3 backups so far. Are the folks having problems using APFS? Are any that are using the older format having problems?

Again, the Mac Extended Journaled Case-Sensitive or not Case Sensitive doesn't work for everybody.

Nice if it does for a lot of users though. For the remaining ones...

I do not have the Mac Cleanup folder on my machine.

I tried with an external disk as well as a dedicated partition on a NAS.

I tried to format APFS (TimeMachine reformats it automatically as it doesn't recognize that format), I tried Mac Extended Journaled Case-Sensitive, Mac Extended Journaled not Case-Sensitive, Journaled alone, encrypted or not, NTFS, FAT, exFAT

None of those do work. TimeMachine behaves normally until it reaches about 95% without a hitch and then starts growing forever until the drive is full.

I just gave up. This is totally amateur.