Monterey Time Machine destroyed my SSD

[Glenny2lappies]

Oh the upgrade went so well. The Catalina dog that finally quietened down after 5 or so releases, such a painful upgrade.

Decided to do a so-called upgrade from Catalina straight to Monterey on my 16" 2019 MacBook Pro. It went well; had a couple of Time Machine backup disks before doing the update and it pretty much "just worked". Due to the change, I also needed to update VMWare Fusion for the VMs I earn my money from. Little Snitch also needed an update. Lucky me chose the Black Friday weekend and got a good discount from both.

Happy days. I thought maybe, just maybe, Apple had learned from the Catalina problems and all was behind me.


Then I connected one of the Time Machine backup disks to do the first Monterey backup. Have nearly 3TB of data, so knew the task would take some time. Plugged it in at midnight and left it running.

All fine until 16:30 the next day: bang, a full kernel panic and shutdown.

When I touched the fingerprint reader the machine powered on... Huh, how strange. Then a notification that there was a crash and would I like to report it to the kind people at Apple. Was Time Machine that paniced the kernel. Ho hum, APFS to the rescue with a large SSD, no problems.

Except there was a huge issue; Finder reported 3.3TB free instead of the 1.2TB which should be there. Hmmmm.

So ran up the Disk Utility to check the file system partitions with a bit of first aid. Deep joy; reported a pile of APFS_KIND_UPDATES and basically hung; no fans running, mouse moved but the spinning beachball of doom was strangely not turning. Left it overnight, no change. Then rebooted.

The machine was now "running in a funny way"; think the Ministry of Silly Walks sort of funny way.

The Mac was slowly dying, eventually even the keyboad gave up...

Lots of support ensued, but to no avail. The file system was permanently corrupted. Nothing else to be done except erase my SSD. My life is on that SSD, now it's hanging on the (two) Time Machine backups, like a climber on a single rope. It should work, but then again the $%^&*(ing piece of $%^&* Time Machine had killed my kernel and SSD to cause this grief.

Have gone back to Catlina. That festering turd Monterey can shove itself up its copious rear end -- along with that hideous UI design.

Thus Monterey has earned it's place on my s4!t list.


A warning to others. Leave it alone.



Currently running the Time Machine recovery to a newly erased SSD and newly installed Catalina.


TBC...

 

[whg]

Oh the upgrade went so well. The Catalina dog that finally quietened down after 5 or so releases, such a painful upgrade.

Decided to do a so-called upgrade from Catalina straight to Monterey on my 16" 2019 MacBook Pro. It went well; had a couple of Time Machine backup disks before doing the update and it pretty much "just worked". Due to the change, I also needed to update VMWare Fusion for the VMs I earn my money from. Little Snitch also needed an update. Lucky me chose the Black Friday weekend and got a good discount from both.

Happy days. I thought maybe, just maybe, Apple had learned from the Catalina problems and all was behind me.


Then I connected one of the Time Machine backup disks to do the first Monterey backup. Have nearly 3TB of data, so knew the task would take some time. Plugged it in at midnight and left it running.

All fine until 16:30 the next day: bang, a full kernel panic and shutdown.

When I touched the fingerprint reader the machine powered on... Huh, how strange. Then a notification that there was a crash and would I like to report it to the kind people at Apple. Was Time Machine that paniced the kernel. Ho hum, APFS to the rescue with a large SSD, no problems.

Except there was a huge issue; Finder reported 3.3TB free instead of the 1.2TB which should be there. Hmmmm.

So ran up the Disk Utility to check the file system partitions with a bit of first aid. Deep joy; reported a pile of APFS_KIND_UPDATES and basically hung; no fans running, mouse moved but the spinning beachball of doom was strangely not turning. Left it overnight, no change. Then rebooted.

The machine was now "running in a funny way"; think the Ministry of Silly Walks sort of funny way.

The Mac was slowly dying, eventually even the keyboad gave up...

Lots of support ensued, but to no avail. The file system was permanently corrupted. Nothing else to be done except erase my SSD. My life is on that SSD, now it's hanging on the (two) Time Machine backups, like a climber on a single rope. It should work, but then again the $%^&*(ing piece of $%^&* Time Machine had killed my kernel and SSD to cause this grief.

Have gone back to Catlina. That festering turd Monterey can shove itself up its copious rear end -- along with that hideous UI design.

Thus Monterey has earned it's place on my s4!t list.


A warning to others. Leave it alone.



Currently running the Time Machine recovery to a newly erased SSD and newly installed Catalina.


TBC...

I can feel your pain! I was on Big Sur on my MBP 16" (2019) and installed Monterey after having tested it without any issue on my older MBP 15" (2017) since the first beta of Monterey. Maybe it's this darned T2 chip that makes all the difference? I had to finally do a clean install of Monterey on the 16" and now, to my surprise, it really works better than ever bevor! With one notable exception: Time Machine.

I use a LaCIE 20TB drive for all my backups. This drive was also used as Time Machine drive for the 16". I wanted to continue as I did before on Big Sur. Unfortunately, I missed to read some warnings, and ended up with a newly formatted 20TB drive with APFS file system. All old files lost! I could restore everything from my older LaCIE 16TB which was my second backup. Now I use a separate drive for Time Machine backups.

The funny thing is this: On the 20TB drive I have a folder named "TimeMachine" that I share on the local network as Time Machine drive. My 15" can happily use it for Time Machine backups without caring for file system and what else is on the shared drive. Why can't the 16", to which the drive is physically connected, not do the same?

 

[Mike Boreham]

The funny thing is this: On the 20TB drive I have a folder named "TimeMachine" that I share on the local network as Time Machine drive. My 15" can happily use it for Time Machine backups without caring for file system and what else is on the shared drive. Why can't the 16", to which the drive is physically connected, not do the same?

I can't recall the exact details, but at one point recently (launch of Big Sur ?) Time Machine would carry on using an existing Time Machine backup that had been started previously, but any new backup had to be APFS (case sensitive).

So maybe your situation is related to this... 16" was a new backup and the 15" was an old one?

 

[Ifti]

I also have a 16" 2019 MBP.
Upgraded from Big Sur to Monterey.
Everything seemed OK at first - until the random issues started. I could have lived with it, but not with FCPX becoming very slow - just opening an event would take up to a minute each time. It was getting too much.

Hence used a CCC clone to restore Big Sur instead.
Big Sur has been quite stable for me, so I'm sticking with it for the life of this MBP. I've decided the only time I will upgrade my OS is when I replace the machine in a few years time!

 

[Glenny2lappies]

The recovery was time-consuming and had to be done twice.

I have no trust in Monterey so I upgraded my machine back to Catalina.

Had to erase the SSD using Recovery Mode Disk Utility. Had to delete the partitions (or whatever the new name is) and recreate them.

Ran the installer to install Catalina and then tried to do the import of the Time Machine backup. This FAILED by hanging after three hours -- the info bar was flying left & right, but nothing was happening.

Powered off and ran the Disk Utility to discover some unrecoverable errors on the main Macintosh HD - Data partition.

Then deleted it, recreated the volumes, ran the installer to recover from the Time Machine backup (without installing the OS) and this worked, although took 20 hours.

When it completed I re-ran the Disk Utility to check the partitions and all was OK this time.

Booted the machine and it was back to last Friday's state prior to the installation of Monterey.


The initial problem logfile of the panic/kernel crash is now lost as the SSD was reformatted. I remember it said about Time Machine causing the panic. How that killed the SSD is anyone's guess. I'm definitely keeping an eye on the SSD in case it's some hardware failure (still don't like Monterey); time will tell.


Can now get back to work. Lost two days of work because of this crash and am rather hacked off about this (and lost all my work on Monday and Tuesday when it was working).


Not impressed with Monterey. Seems most of the "updates" are trivial -- new emojis, wow, that will earn me more money. The look and feel's horrible, too grey and now with that hybrid not-so-flat design, almost a retro feel to it. Also feels somewhat dumbed down.


I suppose this was a good reminder of how much of my life is on these machines; how much I rely on them; how life is like for systems that crash all the time! But most of all how disruptive it is.