Initial Time Machine Backup Failures Increasingly Being Reported by Mac Users

[-griffy-]

What fixed this for me on my 16" M1 Max was going into recovery mode and using disk utility to repair both volumes on the internal SSD. I then erased my Time Machine drive that was accumulating the failed backups to restore the lost space. Time Machine has been successfully backing up since then. This was suggested by a user in a thread on the forums here, who I believe got it from Apple support.

Trying to complete the initial backup in Safe mode didn't work for me, but the above seemed to resolve the issue.

EDIT: Here is the post I had seen. I should note this still worked for me even though I kept my Time Machine drive connected to my Caldigit TS3+ dock rather than connecting directly to the Macbook Pro.

 

[Cameront9]

Good to finally see this issue highlighted on the main page. I've had this problem on my Macbook Air (Intel) since upgrading to Monterey. FYI it's not only an initial backup that's affected as the headline mentions. I was unable to complete a backup at all.

The solution was to boot into Safe mode and do the Time Machine backup there. That allowed the backup to complete.

 

[Lucas Curious]

One thing to note is that it seems to be strictly Apple Silicon Mac's being affected. I haven't seen anyone running Intel X86 reporting any problems. My two older MacBook Pro 13-inch models don't have any issues like this running 12.0.1 or 12.1 either. It's just my Apple Silicon systems exhibiting the issue.

I have tried all the tricks. Clean install using 12.0.1 IPSW files. Running the first backup in Safe Mode. Manually excluding all the "com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetPeople*" files that the debug logs are complaining about doesn't fix it for me either. The only thing that works for me is to exclude the entire /Library/ folder all together but then you loose much of the point with a system backup in the first place.

It even fails straight after a complete DFU restore of my system. If I do a full DFU restore using IPSW and the only thing I do is to configure my Mac mini and head straight into Time Machine and configure my backup it fails. Only on macOS Monterey that is, DFU restore back to Big Sur 11.6 and it works, but not on 11.6.1.

I had this problem all the time with 16" intel

 

[Piscatorius]

Time Machine has been broken since Catalina.

Yes, I can confirm that. I use Time Machine in combination with an AirPort Time Capsule on both my iMacs. I've never had any problems with it on the older model, an iMac 5,1 running Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8. It still works great, and has done so now since 2007 (!), even if it is a bit slower in everything than its younger brother. On the younger model, an iMac 14,3 running macOS Catalina 10.15.7, I regularly get error messages during Time Machine backups since Catalina, but strangely enough only in combination with the Airport Time Capsule. To be on the safe side, I have connected an additional external hard drive from Intenso to the iMac 14,3 for backups, and with it there are no error messages during Time Machine backups on this iMac.

 

[gank41]

Hmm. And what about *restoring* from Time Machine? Vast numbers of people saying in this thread that all is fine with Time Machine …

An untested backup is not a backup

That applies to TM and CCC and all the rest.

How to test:

SuperDuper and CCC and others: you should be able to boot from the backup and open a few files & check the contents are what you expect. Or possibly explore the backup in Finder & open some files there.

Time Machine: Quick test: Open Time Machine in Finder and check what backup dates are available. Are they what you expect? Restore a few files and see if they are what you expect.

Full test: grab a blank HDD and do a full restore from scratch. This may need to run overnight / over the weekend. Boot up from the restored HDD and check files and their contents are what you expect.

If you haven’t checked your backup in the last few months then you effectively have no backup

Note: Checking that files restore properly can also be dangerous - restored files / folders can accidentally overwrite current files or get inserted into existing workflow / interact with other backup / online systems in unexpected ways. Take care when doing this.

I am well aware of how to verify my various backups. Again, I've been burned in the past and have been very diligent in confirming I have many backups ;-)

 

[EugW]

One thing to note is that it seems to be strictly Apple Silicon Mac's being affected. I haven't seen anyone running Intel X86 reporting any problems. My two older MacBook Pro 13-inch models don't have any issues like this running 12.0.1 or 12.1 either. It's just my Apple Silicon systems exhibiting the issue.

I've had problems on three different Intel Macs, two 11.6.1 Big Sur, and one on (patched) Catalina. One of the Time Machine backups was APFS, directly connected to a Big Sur Mac. It started behaving erratically, constantly being accessed, but without changing anything on disk. The other two Time Machine backups (one from a Big Sur machine and one from a Catalina machine) were with an HFS+ drive connected to an AirPort Extreme. For some reason the machines just stopped communicating with it. Originally I had thought it was related to a network switch swap, but I'm now thinking it's part of a wider issue.

The solution for all three of them was to nuke the Time Machine backup - reformat the drives and start all over again. Now they all seem to work fine, with the files there and accessible, and automatic backups working fine.

BTW, these three Intel Macs are the only three Macs I had on Time Machine, so I'm at 3/3 for Time Machine failures, all within the last 2 months. Actually, there is a fourth Intel Mac with Time Machine, but I only got the machine a few weeks ago, meaning its Time Machine backup is less than a month old - hasn't had time to fail yet.

 

[Techcomm]

Apple's built-in Time Machine backup solution for macOS appears to be causing problems for some Mac users running the latest versions of Monterey and Big Sur, based on a steady trickle of reports on both the MacRumors Forums and Reddit.

While some users are complaining of different issues with Time Machine on different Macs and versions of macOS that are hard to replicate, one common complaint in particular has surfaced regarding Time Machine backups not completing for M1 Mac users running Monterey 12.0.1 or Big Sur 11.6.1.

The issue seems to occur when Time Machine runs its first backup after either Monterey/Big Sur is first installed or the operating system is updated to the latest point release. Time Machine says it is "Waiting to Complete First Backup," but as it appears to be reaching its conclusion, Time Machine suddenly reports "Oldest backup: None" and "Latest backup: None," and then fails to offer any notice that the initial backup has successfully been performed at all.

MacRumors forum member likegadgets reports:
Reddit user muhdakml reports:
Reddit user jg66ue reports:
MacRumors forum member netnative reports:
Some users report clean installing macOS or running the first backup in Safe mode has sorted out the problem for them, but that's not the case for everyone and a universal solution remains hard to come by for most of those affected.

Some users speculate that the issue could be related to an unspecified change to the APFS format that Apple has quietly implemented in recent versions of macOS, but it's still not entirely clear what's going on. We've reached out to Apple for comment and we'll update this article if we get more clarity on the problem, but for those afflicted by the error, the advice for now is to use a third-party backup solution like Superduper! or Carbon Copy Cloner.

Article Link: Initial Time Machine Backup Failures Increasingly Being Reported by Mac Users

I don’t understand all these issues with new releases all of the sudden with Apple? Apparently they are not fully testing the software before release. Seems the customers are the ones doing quality control. Very disappointing.

 

[tfigs]

Wow glad to see I am not alone!!! I’ve had this problem since I got my 14” MacBook Pro. I’ve been in touch with Apple support for over a week and spent several hours on the phone but they still could not find a solution. The rep said hopefully an upcoming software update will fix it. I’ve been using Carbon Copy Cloner for my backups until this is fixed

 

[iDave]

I was having trouble with new TM backups as well as updates to older backups on M1 iMac and Big Sur using external drives. Monterey seems to have fixed the issues for me.

My backup routine is weekly or monthly, not daily or hourly. So when I plugged in a drive to do a subsequent/incremental backup I discovered problems that didn't exist before the last Big Sur update.

 

[xjames]

I was backing up fine on my late 2013 MBP on a regular HD plugged to the back of the time capsule. (the time capsule HD stopped working ages ago).

On my beautiful new 16 inch M1Pro MBP, I couldn't complete one time machine backup. It always hangs before completing, waiting to finish.

PS: I didn't try to inherit the previous backup as I didn't migrate, I just started everything from scratch

 

[name99]

Howard Oakley has been reporting this as an issue since before Monterey was final.
However it does seem to be random. I can say that the Monterey backups I started from scratch (because I wiped the drives and reformatted them as APFS, to take advantage of the fact that Monterey can now back up to APFS) all went through without a hitch.
That's two different macs, writing to four different drives, and two of the backup drives are frankendrives, JBOD's, each created by gluing together three older drives. Given all the horror stories about Monterey backup to APFS, I expected this might fail, and I would have to land up cracking those JBODs, recreating them, and reformatting back to JHFS+, but everything went essentially as smoothly as one could hope. In one case the first backup was actually interrupted by a power cut, but it resumed just fine after power was restored.

So the system mostly does work, even under strange conditions. But there've been enough reports of issues (from reliable observers) that there does seem to be a real problem for a few unlucky folks.

 

[neuropsychguy]

The issue is only with new backups, not continuing existing backups. I successfully used my long term TM backup to downgrade from 12.1 beta to 12.0.1 due to boot camp issues with 12.1 .

The issue doesn’t show up until the end of the backup. Please keep us posted.

Will edit my comment. You are correct. It does not complete.

Edit: Maybe completed. Won't know until I'm back home.

 

[umbilical]

This is the only thing that you need: https://bombich.com/

 

[name99]

Howard Oakley has been reporting this as an issue since before Monterey was final.
However it does seem to be random. I can say that the Monterey backups I started from scratch (because I wiped the drives and reformatted them as APFS, to take advantage of the fact that Monterey can now back up to APFS) all went through without a hitch.
That's two different macs, writing to four different drives, and two of the backup drives are frankendrives, JBOD's, each created by gluing together three older drives. Given all the horror stories about Monterey backup to APFS, I expected this might fail, and I would have to land up cracking those JBODs, recreating them, and reformatting back to JHFS+, but everything went essentially as smoothly as one could hope. In one case the first backup was actually interrupted by a power cut, but it resumed just fine after power was restored.

So the system mostly does work, even under strange conditions. But there've been enough reports of issues (from reliable observers) that there does seem to be a real problem for a few unlucky folks.

I do wonder if the people with trouble have bad hardware in their drives?
Obviously in a perfect world
- the drives would not have bad hardware, AND
- they would report bad hardware to the OS, AND
- Apple would detect bad hardware and report it to the user.

In reality all three of these fail badly. I've been using enough storage (spinning disks and SSDs) for long enough to be well aware of just how randomly they fail (random in time, random in how often it happens after you bought them, random in how obvious the symptoms are). But I'm constantly surprised at how little less experienced users know of the health of their drives. There are, in particular, failure modes (which Apple REALLY should catch, but does not. Sigh.) where the drive can slow down dramatically as it constantly tries to read and write some bad sectors that keep returning errors.

One thing you all can do is download DriveDx. This is not free (though it's worth paying for!) but does give you a free week or whatever trial period. I'd recommend everyone having these backup problems to at least download it and report what it says about your backup storage. It may be that that storage is a lot less healthy than you thought...

(I'm not claiming every problem DriveDx reports is a real issue. But if you don't know how to interpret the data, and you have a combination of "drive seems incapable of getting to the end of a long backup" and a lot of errors being reported,
you're probably better off just getting some new backup storage.

Or at the very least,
- wipe the storage completely -- use Secure Erase in Disk Utility so that every sector is written with zeros, and any bad sectors are removed from usage
- try filling up the storage manually by finder copies, and seeing if there are any unexpected slownesses in the copying
- wipe the storage completely again
- now try Time Machine again)

 

[AndrewWx]

Nice to see this issue on the front page. My TM back up stopped in late October and I have been trying to figure it out since. M1 Mini and it was not the initial back up.

 

[fakestrawberryflavor]

Same issue here. A reimage did not fix it. Also tried the 12.1 beta, same issue.

 

[Supp0rtLinux]

Apple's built-in Time Machine backup solution for macOS appears to be causing problems for some Mac users running the latest versions of Monterey and Big Sur, based on a steady trickle of reports on both the MacRumors Forums and Reddit.

While some users are complaining of different issues with Time Machine on different Macs and versions of macOS that are hard to replicate, one common complaint in particular has surfaced regarding Time Machine backups not completing for M1 Mac users running Monterey 12.0.1 or Big Sur 11.6.1.

The issue seems to occur when Time Machine runs its first backup after either Monterey/Big Sur is first installed or the operating system is updated to the latest point release. Time Machine says it is "Waiting to Complete First Backup," but as it appears to be reaching its conclusion, Time Machine suddenly reports "Oldest backup: None" and "Latest backup: None," and then fails to offer any notice that the initial backup has successfully been performed at all.

MacRumors forum member likegadgets reports:
Reddit user muhdakml reports:
Reddit user jg66ue reports:
MacRumors forum member netnative reports:
Some users report clean installing macOS or running the first backup in Safe mode has sorted out the problem for them, but that's not the case for everyone and a universal solution remains hard to come by for most of those affected.

Some users speculate that the issue could be related to an unspecified change to the APFS format that Apple has quietly implemented in recent versions of macOS, but it's still not entirely clear what's going on. We've reached out to Apple for comment and we'll update this article if we get more clarity on the problem, but for those afflicted by the error, the advice for now is to use a third-party backup solution like Superduper! or Carbon Copy Cloner.

Article Link: Initial Time Machine Backup Failures Increasingly Being Reported by Mac Users

Old system was a 2013 13" MBP with a USB-B HiSpeed connected external drive (back when you could take your Mac apart... put in a 512Gb SSD and moved the stock spindle drive to an external enclosure for Time Machine). Bought a new 16" M1; already had 12.0 installed; installed 12.0.1 then connected brand new NVMe drive connected with a high speed USB-C 3.2 cable. Formatted in Disk Util, then let Time Machine own it and reformat it encrypted. First backup with all my migrated files was 200Gb and took about 4 min. No problems finishing (isn't a personal issue either ). I leave it connected all the time with options set to backup on battery/sleep. It backs up hourly with no issues.

 

[MacBH928]

this is like one of the wierdest most twisted apps to work with. It does things so unconventionally.

Carbon Copy Cloner, always worked always reliable.

 

[tatarin]

Nice to see this issue on the front page. My TM back up stopped in late October and I have been trying to figure it out since. M1 Mini and it was not the initial back up.

TM stopped making backups of my new 14” MacBook Pro to my 2TB Time Capsule on 22 Nov. All my existing backups from 2018 to 22 Nov 2021 were available and files could be restored with no problems. These backups used 1.3 TB of disk space. TM did show snapshots of the most recent two day period but there were no full backups later than 22 Nov and none could be created.



Two days ago I decided to start over so I used the “archive” function in AirPort Utility to archive my 1.3 TB backup to a 2 TB WD USB drive by connecting the drive to the USB port of the Time Capsule. Creating the archive took over 24 hours. After verifying that I could restore files from the archive, I reformatted the Time Capsule as APFS and started TM from scratch. So far, TM is working fine.

 

[rmariboe]

Noticed mine hadn't done a backup since October. Manually initiating TM backup resulted in "timeline corrupted, need to wipe everything, start over" or something. Did the wipe, TM started doing the backup. Now the "Oldest: None", "Newest, None" issue. WTF.
At least is says "Next backup: today, 22:27" - we'll see how that goes as there is no "backup now" button anymore...

Edit: There never was a "backup now" button - it's a menu item ? Using it fails pretty much instantly though.

Edit2: Second attempt seems less futile. "5001 changes found" - and counting...

Edit3: Hum, seems to be carrying on from where it failed ?

Edit4: And, 10 hours later, stuck at "15.6% done" "calculating remaining time" - not much further than last night...

Edit5: Now, two days later... 22.1%. I guess in a few weeks I'll be able to take my laptop with me again, maybe.

 

[simon lefisch]

One of many reasons as to why Apple needs to quit the 12-month release cycle and go to an 18-month release cycle, at minimum.

 

[Apple_Robert]

I don’t understand all these issues with new releases all of the sudden with Apple? Apparently they are not fully testing the software before release. Seems the customers are the ones doing quality control. Very disappointing.

Time Machine has been problematic (for many people) for years. That is why I stopped using the feature as it can't be trusted to complete a backup, not to mention one that isn't corrupt in some manner.

 

[Chaos215bar2]

That's what I kept finding too , after months of backups all useless now. Flawed product if you can't rely on it to recover from

Literally happened to me this morning.

The worst part is, even though I had more free space on the drive than space occupied by the backup, it insists on deleting the old backup before it will try to create a new one, leaving you with absolutely nothing to recover from in the mean time.

 

[incoherent_1]

Moved away from TM, except keeping one at home for quick fixes. Local backups are more for convenience than redundancy anyway. Everything mission critical must be backed up offsite.

Anyone looking for an offsite solution, I highly recommend Arq, as it lets you choose your service and storage class. Places like BB are a ripoff, and I’ve more than once been given BS reasons why my backup was removed — I’d much rather have direct control of the storage (eg. AWS).

 

[goobot]

I’ve been having problems for a while now on my 2016 mbp