El Capitan: Time Machine quits after I enter it

[mgru]

I tried entering Time Machine for the first time today since upgrading to El Capitan. It starts to show the TM screen and then quits. I cannot enter Time Machine.

I find that one person reported this issue in the Apple Discussions a few days ago but he has not received a reply.

My iMac is regularly doing TM backups - it's just I can't go back into them. This is, to say the least, not a happy situation.

Any assistance would be most welcome.

 

[uajafd]

Fire up /Applications/Utilities/Console.app, then try to start Time Machine again, watch it crash, see messages logged into the console.

 

[mgru]

Fire up /Applications/Utilities/Console.app, then try to start Time Machine again, watch it crash, see messages logged into the console.

Thanks for replying so promptly uajafd.

This the start of the crash report (don't know if it will give you any clues) :

Process: Finder [330]
Path: /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder
Identifier: com.apple.finder
Version: 10.11 (10.11)
Build Info: Finder_FE-960000002000000~11
Code Type: X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: ??? [1]
Responsible: Finder [330]
User ID: 502

Date/Time: 2015-10-19 17:38:45.724 +0300
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.11 (15A284)
Report Version: 11
Anonymous UUID: 686D*******


Time Awake Since Boot: 820 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSRangeException', reason: '*** -[__NSArrayM objectAtIndex:]: index 0 beyond bounds for empty array'
terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException
abort() called

 

[uajafd]

Wow, so it's Finder that actually crashes. And you've found a bug.

But what if you delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist (or move it somewhere safe) just to see if you can start TM from scratch?

 

[mgru]

Deleted the plist. Time Machine asked me to set up the TM disk anew but sadly it's still crashing as before.

 

[mgru]

OK. Solved it from another search.

It's an El Cap bug involving secondary monitors. When I unplug the second monitor TM works fine!

See details here: http://packetslave.com/blog/2015/10/15/unable-to-enter-time-machine-on-os-x-10.11-el-capitan/

There is a suggestion on that site to uncheck “Displays have separate Spaces” in Mission Control prefs to solve the issue but it didn't work for me. Unplugging the external monitor solved it.

Thanks again for your help uajafd.

 

[uajafd]

/me takes a note

And those people keep telling me GNOME on Linux is buggy, heh