MacBook Pro 2021 - Time Machine problems

[donawalt]

HI all, I am having trouble with my Time Machine backups. I discovered last night that it had not done a backup since last Saturday - it was a TM backup disk I transferred over from my old Mac about 2-3 weeks ago. After not seeing much to go on in Disk Utility, I ended up erasing and reformatting the disk as APFS. TM made it APFS Encrypted, case sensitive when I checked the encrypted box - I saw this in Disk Utility just now.

So this morning I started fresh, on a 10 TB empty external drive. It looked like the backup was about to complete say an hour later, and when I got back to my desk later the status was "Waiting to complete first backup". It appears to be continuing to do backups on the hour, but it always says "Waiting to complete first backup". It also does not acknowledge that any backups were done - see the picture below.

I don't remember ever seeing this before, is it working correctly? There is about 1 TB of data in use, 9 TB available right now - and I have about 1 TB of data on my Mac. Is it trying to prep the full 10TB for encryption maybe, and that will take awhile? I am not sure if this is broken, hardware trouble, or what. Thanks!

 

[PBG4 Dude]

Check out this thread.

Initial Time Machine Backup Failures Increasingly Being Reported by Mac Users

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...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[oikos]

HI all, I am having trouble with my Time Machine backups. I discovered last night that it had not done a backup since last Saturday - it was a TM backup disk I transferred over from my old Mac about 2-3 weeks ago. After not seeing much to go on in Disk Utility, I ended up erasing and reformatting the disk as APFS. TM made it APFS Encrypted, case sensitive when I checked the encrypted box - I saw this in Disk Utility just now.

So this morning I started fresh, on a 10 TB empty external drive. It looked like the backup was about to complete say an hour later, and when I got back to my desk later the status was "Waiting to complete first backup". It appears to be continuing to do backups on the hour, but it always says "Waiting to complete first backup". It also does not acknowledge that any backups were done - see the picture below.

I don't remember ever seeing this before, is it working correctly? There is about 1 TB of data in use, 9 TB available right now - and I have about 1 TB of data on my Mac. Is it trying to prep the full 10TB for encryption maybe, and that will take awhile? I am not sure if this is broken, hardware trouble, or what. Thanks!

View attachment 1935741

Not good. I recall seeing someone else with a very similar situation, but I don't know what to ascribe it to or how to fix, sorry.

I have not transferred my 2 TB of files from my iMac to my new 4 TB MBP16 yet, and it is starting to look a little scary. But I did restore my old MBP13" a couple weeks ago from a TimeMachine made literally a couple hours before I dropped the computer on a hardwood floor, after which I had to pay Apple to replace almost the whole machine, including motherboard, storage, RAM, screen ($600, not bad). But since then, one of my Carbon Copy Cloner backup drives will no longer work.

This may sound excessive, but I run 4-5 backups on my machines, at least 2 each with 2 different softwares (TimeMachine and CarbonCopy Cloner), because I've had too many backups fail in the past - especially TimeMachine with Apple's TimeCapsules. I then rotate one set to my neighborhood bank safe deposit box once a month, so I have a safe offsite set.

Good luck, I look forward to others' thoughts.