Mojave time machine back up failing

After multiple failed attempts to get Time Machine to complete a full initial backup, I seem to have hit upon a workaround solution.

I noticed in Activity Monitor that two apps were always eating up a LOT of processor cycles during the failing backups - SPOTLIGHT was apparently trying to index the new backup disk as it was being written and I think NORTON SECURITY was also trying to virus-scan it at the same time.

1. I erased the old Time Machine drive with Disk Utility and gave it a new name
2. I shut off all Norton scans temporarily
3. System Preferences>Spotlight>"Excluded" the new Time Machine drive from indexing and also the entire Macintosh HD (temporarily)
4. Time Machine> unchecked "Back Up Automatically"
5. Deleted Macintosh HD>Library>Preferences>com.apple.TimeMachine.plist and emptied the Trash
6. Restarted the computer
7. Quit Norton Security
8. Double-checked to make sure everything was Excluded from Spotlight indexing
9. Time Machine> deleted the prior Time Machine drive name and replaced it with the newly created one
10. Time Machine> checked "Back Up Automatically" and started backup
11. This time the full 390GB backup ran at "light speed" and completed in about two hours (via USB 3.1)
12. Restored Norton to original settings
13. Removed the Spotlight "Exclusion" for Macintosh HD, but retained the exclusion of the new Time Machine drive
14. Restarted the computer and let it resume "business as usual".

PROBLEM SOLVED! You're welcome. :-)

I solved my TM problem.

The software ATI (Acronis True Image) has got a special feature called "Active Protection".

When you turn on this feature, two very strange files are created in /private/var/db:

-rw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 723223911544 Dec 31 10:28 atpstatdb00.db

-rw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 103115912776 Dec 31 10:28 atpstatdb14.db

Together they show a size of 769 GB.

But when I used sudo du -hs /private/var/db it showed only 6.4 GB.

In fact TM started with telling about 130 GB to backup.

But during backup TM increased this 130 GB more and more.

Obviously TM "thought" that these files had 769 GB or something like that.

I disabled the ATI "Active Protection" feature and deleted the two files.

After a reboot one of the two files have been recreated:

-rw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 812 Feb 14 21:53 atpstatdb00.db

But only with a size of 812 Byte.

After that the TM works as expected without any exclusions.

I came to this solution by creating more and more exclusions over the complete disc.

Then removing one by one until I found /private/var/db beeing the reason for the TM problem.

My last post got garbled by the system! I shall try again to post the message from the Bug Reporter engineers.

'Time Machine intentionall yields to other processes in the system trying to do IO or CPU intensive tasks.  The diagnostic shows that Time Machine is heavily IO throttled because of all the other processes doing IO on your system. Most of the I/O seems to be coming from "Sync Folder Pro", but there is also significant IO from dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Clam AV (which is scanning files being synced by Syn Folders Pro and dropbox possibly?)

It's hard to tell if Sync Folders Pro is just busy or malfunctioning.

I'd suggest trying the backup again when your system is less loaded.  If you continue to have problems please try disabling Sync Folders Pro and be sure that your AV software is not scanning your backup destination drive.  (You might want to experimentally disable the AV software and see if that helps as well).'

So I turned every running application off and started a new TM backup, submitting several sysdiagnose files to Bug Reporter during its duration. 'Preparing Backup' lasted for nearly 6 hours. Then 'Backing up' began, became extremely slow at one stage, then accelerated madly to a finish about 3 hours after starting. As far as I can tell, the backup is complete.

It is clear from this whole discussion that TM's behaviour or misbehaviour varies hugely from one user's computer and its contents to another, but it does seem that, as indicated by the engineers' statement which I have now succeeded in copying and pasting (above), turning off applications — and especially other file-copying and transferring applications — may be the way to go.

My Diag and my solution

I saw that in console at the moment that Time Machine fails:

par défaut 09:42:29.051621 +0100 powerd Process backupd.1538 Summary PreventUserIdleSystemSleep "Time Machine backup" age:00:05:21 id:4295001047 [System: PrevIdle DeclUser kDisp]

par défaut 09:42:29.051799 +0100 powerd Process backupd.1538 Summary BackgroundTask "Time Machine backup" age:00:05:21 id:47244674006 [System: PrevIdle DeclUser kDisp]

erreur 09:43:53.726169 +0100 backupd Error: (-48) SrcErr:NO Copying /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/japet/2019-01-22-093709/Macintosh HD/Users/jj/Library/Containers/com.nektony.App-Cleaner/Data/Library/Application Support/App Cleaner & Uninstal‌ler to /Volumes/TM Interne/Backups.backupdb/japet/2019-01-22-093709.inProgress/10E5ACEA-B435-419D-A126-45CA262B5521/Macintosh HD/Users/jj/Library/Containers/com.nektony.App-Cleaner/Data/Library/Application Support

erreur 09:43:53.734225 +0100 backupd Stopping backup.

erreur 09:43:53.734351 +0100 backupd Error: (-8062) SrcErr:NO Copying /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/japet/2019-01-22-093709/Macintosh HD/Users/jj/Library/Containers/com.nektony.App-Cleaner/Data/Library/Application Support/App Cleaner & Uninstal‌ler/News2_v22/news.html to (null)

erreur 09:43:53.790576 +0100 backupd Copy stage failed with error:11

erreur 09:43:54.948295 +0100 backupd Backup failed with error 11: 11

par défaut 09:43:54.953121 +0100 backupd MessageTracer: load_domain_wh

The problem is "App Cleaner & Uninstal‌ler" creates directories and or files that are not accepted by MacOS and then can't be copied. MacOS stops time Machine

I note that "App Cleaner & Uninstal‌ler" from Nektony is'nt in Apple Store. Prehaps some others Apps have the same problem

Solutions:

Exclude the directories: /Users/jj/Library/containers/com.nektony..... from TimeMachine (use Options to see all the directories)

OR/AND

Delete : all the directories begin with /Users/jj/Library/containers/com.nektony/App Cleaner

Obviously, the Mojave OSX has a bad bug problem with its TIM, which has been known and reported for many months.

Well known problem:

Can be seen in the Console (with user administrator): search "backupd"

"erreur 09:43:53.790576 +0100 backupd Copy stage failed with error:11"

the file that cant be copied is shown. Generally it is a file from a "not apple application"

Solutions:

- Unistall the application and ALL its files

OR

- exclude from TmeMachine the directories which contain the files

Somebody said that the problem dissapeared some time later but I am not sure

I found a very simple solution, after a couple of weeks struggling with this issue: free as much space as possible on the source disk, as under Mojave the snapshots seem to be much bigger than with previous versions.

After performing all possible repairs and resets, I reviewed the console with "backupd" as suggested above, and found this:

System Policy: deny(1) file-read-data /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb (etc.)

The (other) culprit is my habit of never emptying the trash until I am required to do so.

Had 11 Gb available, 62 Gb in the trash. Backup size was an estimated 77 Gb in TM prefs.

Emptied the trash, now got 73 Gb available, backup went like a charm.

Maybe an explanation would be that the snapshot on the source disk requires (almost) as much space as the backup estimated size.

Hope this helps.

higherterrain wrote:

Time Machine won't back up with a corrupt snapshot.

You have to do the same work as I did to find out which file is responsible on your machine:

Exclude everything from the root of your harddisc.

See if TM works now.

Then remove one directory by one from the exclusion list and everytime do a TM backup.

When TM fails, you have found the directory below which the "bad file" must be.

Then go into this directory and exclude everything.

Then remove one directory by one from the exclusion list and everytime do a TM backup.

When TM fails, you have found the subdirectory below which the "bad file" must be.

And so on....

It will probably take a few hours to find the "bad file(s)".

Please document here which one it was!

I contributed to this apparently endless string of posts about Time Machine failing in Mojave some time ago. Since then much of the discussion has been well outside my technical competence, but one very useful contribution pointed out that Time Machine is designed to give way to any other data-transferring or -copying applications that may be running.

I use Sync Folders Pro, running all the time, to copy the contents of my Desktop and Documents folders and a folder containing the scores of my musical compositions to my iCloud folder; I also use Carbon Copy Cloner as a backup system in parallel with Time Machine (belts and braces!). After updating to Mojave, I experienced the problem of TM not completing its backup that has been the subject of this string, and therefore abandoned TM for a while; then tried to do a Time Machine backup, but first shut Sync Folders Pro down and ensured that CCC was also not running. The TM backup still did not complete.

Last night I tried TM yet again, having not used it for probably 2 or 3 months, but I first shut down every and all applications that I have set up to start when I start up the computer. TM remained on 'Preparing Backup' for over 3 hours — even though I have a modest hard drive of a mere 479.89 GB capacity — and I feared the worst, but then it started to back up and completely finished the backup in another 2 hours or thereabouts.

So this might be the generally-applicable and technically simple answer to the TM problem: shut down every single running application apart from Time Machine when performing a TM backup.

I found that reformatting the drive with Journaled- case sensitive, as was suggested in a previous reply, solved my problem

I had similar issues. I attached a second drive to perform the backup just in case my standard time machine raid drive was broken.

Repaired also the rights on the source drive with the recovery partition etc.

By coincidence I opened then the Time Machine in the preferences and unlocked the settings as admin.

Then the backups on all drives worked as usual.

I think all finding are related to the Apple SIP (Integrity Protecion) which was again improved in Mojave.

This is also reflected in the Konsole when you go through the crash and problem system messages.

Please try yourself and keep us posted.

It's been awhile since I visited this thread, but I turned on automatic backups a couple weeks ago and haven't had any issues. That was after initiating the backups manually every few days and having them complete without issues.

One thing I did prior to going back to automatic backups: I removed a very large disk image file that was in a folder that was being backed up via Time Machine as well as to my iCloud Drive. The latter is actually what caused me to investigate further, as my network would slow to a crawl whenever my iMac or my Mac mini uploaded or downloaded the file.

Offloaded the file and no more slow downs and Time Machine works again (so far).

Hello,

I've had the same issue and resolved it by excluding the OneDrive and iCloud drive folders from Time Machine backups.

Hope this works for you

This sounds really hopeful. But could you please explain where you found the facility to unlock the settings? I cannot find it in Time Machine/Preferences, and in System Preferences/Users and Groups, though I can unlock Login Options, I cannot see anything that refers to Time Machine.

"On a different tack, I reported the TM problems in the Apple Bug Reporter and submitted sysdiagnose files some time ago, and received the following reply from the engineers:

 'Time Machine intentionall yields to other processes in the system trying to do IO or CPU intensive tasks.  The diagnostic shows that Time Machine is heavily IO throttled because of all the other processes doing IO on your system. Most of the I/O seems to be coming from "Sync Folder Pro", but there is also significant IO from dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Clam AV (which is scanning files being synced by Syn Folders Pro and dropbox possibly?)  'It's hard to tell if Sync Folders Pro is just busy or malfunctioning.

I'd suggest trying the backup again when your system is less loaded.  If you continue to have problems please try disabling Sync Folders Pro and be sure that your AV software is not scanning your backup destination drive.  (You might want to experimentally disable the AV software and see if that helps as well)."    
 
In the light of this, I am now trying to back my system up again with TM, having first closed all running application. So far, it has been 'Preparing Backup' for 5 hours even though I did a mostly (but not entirely) successful backup a few days ago. I have submitted another sysdiagnose to Bug Reporter. If and when it does a backup, I shall report the result here, and submit another sysdiagnose to Bug Reporter. 

Why this text has gone red is beyond me!

 

                                                                                     

"Unlocking" of the time machine settings in the preference pane.

Just open the standard lock ( I know this sounds a bit humble but just try).

I think most of the issues we face are related to the knew Mojave security architecture where rights are limited for security reasons by the os.

You can check this if the workaround above does not work for you. Just follow these steps:

1. Shut down your MAC
2. Start your make holding the command ⌘ and R button to boot into recovery mode
3. If you are in recovery mode then open the Terminal app via the utilities
4. Copy the following command into the Terminal.app "csrutil disable"
5. You should see a message that confirms "success"
6. Reboot
7. Now the MACs new security concept is disabled. Just try again if your apps are working as they should. Of course you should perform all the things mentioned in this thread e.g. checking your disks for integrity etc. Just have one thing up and running at a time (e.g. do not use a disk cloning tool like "Super Duper" oder "Carbon Copy" at the same time you have time machine running a backup job.
8. If your are hopefully successful with it - you will know if Apples new security level for the MAC is affecting your system giving you and me a hard time. Some apps maybe can not already deal with it.
9. When finished shut down the system again and boot again into recovery mode.
10. Open again the Terminal.app to turn the integrated security back on.
11. Therefore copy the following command into the Terminal "csrutil enable"
12. reboot
13. To check if it is back to normal open in Standard mode again the Terminal app and enter "csrutil status"
14. You will see then a message "System Integrity Protection status: enabled

That is it. Hope this helps you.

Switching to Microsoft is a bit drastic. Just use a 3rd-party app such as SUPER DUPER, which can also be used to create a perfect OS X clone on a disk or hardrive.