Time Machine error

[golfnut1982]

Since updating to Sequoia my Time Machine backups have been failing during night. Every time I wake up the display, I get the same error: "Time Machine did not finish backing up because some files were unavailable. Backups will resume when your Mac is unlocked." My Mac actually never sleeps; I only put the display to sleep. The next backup after waking the display always works.
Anyone is having the same problem?

Try and add this to the exclusion to the Time Machine options under Time Machine Settings ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetPeople

Happened to me as well. I added the above exclusion and no issues anymore.
Also this thread...https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255816799?sortBy=rank
I've seen this before on Sonoma. It eventually gets fixed.

 

[kagharaht]

Also 9to5 Mac has an article on this issue. Perhaps for the time being, I'll turn off hourly backups and just set it to "manually". I have a feeling this constant errors from Time Machine will eventually cause an issue.

macOS 15.2 Sequoia backup bug(s) affecting multiple apps

Update: SuperDuper developer Dave Nanian reports that Apple has fixed the issue in macOS 15.3. One or more backup bugs...

9to5mac.com

 

[MacCheetah3]

I believe it was clearing out the old snapshots.

For this you'll need a tool called Onyx. It's free software that has existed for MacOS for many many years, almost as far back as OS X (first version was for MacOS 10.2). https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html

1. This step alone did not fix the problem but possibly contributed to it. I removed FindMy from my Desktop Widgets since it was a FindMyWidget file that was throwing an error when TM would fail as you can see a few posts ago.
2. Open Time Machine settings, click Options, change Backup Frequency to Manually.
3. Open Onyx and enter your password.
4. Go to the Maintenance Tab. Click Restore Defaults to make sure the default options are enabled. Click Run Tasks. It will close all open apps, run the tasks, then reboot your system.
5. Open Onyx and enter your password.
6. Go to the Utilities Tab. Click APFS Snapshots. Click Delete APFS Snapshots.
7. Close Onyx.
8. Open Time Machine Settings, click Options, change Backup Frequency to Automatically Every Hour.

For me these steps stopped the error and has worked for over 12 hours now. I verified this morning that backups did occur and complete successfully while the system was "asleep". My sleep settings are set at defaults so that the system does sleep when the screen is off and sleeps hard drives when possible. Changing those settings did not resolve my error anyway so back to default I went.

Ok I'm gonna wait for another status from you in a day or two...I have used Onyx once back in 2010 I think. It screwed up my MBP so bad I had to start from scratch. LOL...so I'm going to wait a bit on that.

You don’t need a third-party app to manage snapshots.

View APFS snapshots in Disk Utility on Mac

In Disk Utility on Mac, view a list of APFS snapshots, copy information about the snapshots, and delete them.

support.apple.com

EDIT: I missed that @genexx already mentioned this document.

 

[kagharaht]

I just do it manually now. Soon as I start the day I hit the Backup Now on the menu bar. This is a Mac OS error and only Apple can fix this or not since they are so focused on Ai, Emoji garbage and yearly updates of OS without really focusing on fixing software issues. Gotta add feature after feature after feature....

macOS 15.2 Sequoia backup bug(s) affecting multiple apps

Update: SuperDuper developer Dave Nanian reports that Apple has fixed the issue in macOS 15.3. One or more backup bugs...

9to5mac.com

 

[McMario]

This is a Mac OS error and only Apple can fix this or not since they are so focused on Ai, Emoji garbage and yearly updates of OS without really focusing on fixing software issues. Gotta add feature after feature after feature....

I totally agree; point is, this is not just annoying, this is a major flaw. It's a hit in the fan for commercial users who depend on solid backup performance. Also, the refusal to officially acknowledge this issue is a bad sign for anyone planning to introduce or roll out more Apples in their field.

 

[alexclst]

I've seen this error ever since migrating to an M4 Mac mini, but primarily only if my daily backup to a NAS is attempted while the screen has been locked for a while. If I click through the notification after sitting back down at the Mac, the backup always succeeds. As such, this feels more of an annoyance than a real problem to me, as rarely would important files only on my Mac change when I'm not sitting at it anyway (a lot is synced in cloud storage), but it is quite annoying and I'd love for Apple to acknowledge and fix this.

 

[alexclst]

It seems that adding "~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetPeople" to the excludes may have fixed the issue for me. At any rate, did that a few days ago, and haven't seen the error since. But who knows, your milage may vary, and I wouldn't be too surprised if the issue even comes back for me.

 

[golfnut1982]

It seems that adding "~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetPeople" to the excludes may have fixed the issue for me. At any rate, did that a few days ago, and haven't seen the error since. But who knows, your milage may vary, and I wouldn't be too surprised if the issue even comes back for me.

Worked for me as I said earlier.

 

[kagharaht]

Try and add this to the exclusion to the Time Machine options under Time Machine Settings ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetPeople

Happened to me as well. I added the above exclusion and no issues anymore.
Also this thread...https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255816799?sortBy=rank
I've seen this before on Sonoma. It eventually gets fixed.

Apple sure is taking its time to fix this error. Low priority for them? Perhaps it doesn't cause major system issues or corruption. Just annoyance to their customer base.

 

[Ital]

As Like you i had the same when updating towards 15.2, yet this also happened on 15 and 15.1
But in all cases this was resolved with giving Time machine application full disk access.
It always worked after, no more errors. so maybe you all tried this simple fix or not , if not give it a go.
Good Luck

 

[golfnut1982]

As Like you i had the same when updating towards 15.2, yet this also happened on 15 and 15.1
But in all cases this was resolved with giving Time machine application full disk access.
It always worked after, no more errors. so maybe you all tried this simple fix or not , if not give it a go.
Good Luck

Since its a baked into Apple software, then how come it not added automatically? I just checked mine under privacy settings and the time machine app is not there. Was it removed due to a software update? Is it supposed to be included?

 

[kagharaht]

Since its a baked into Apple software, then how come it not added automatically? I just checked mine under privacy settings and the time machine app is not there. Was it removed due to a software update? Is it supposed to be included?

You would think that it seems redundant. I guess it wouldn't hurt to try. I'm going to try it and see if it really works.

 

[southerndoc]

This is not limited to TM and is a general SMB error. It is absolutely unbelievable that Apple hasn't addressed this since so many people depend on it.

 

[southerndoc]

From Synology support:

I did check with our developers regarding Sequoia's issues with SMB functionality. While we can't speak with them on behalf of individual users, they (Apple Support) have been informed of the issue, and is working on the fix for the service. Apple Support maintains that the fix should be provided in the next OS update.

Here's hoping next version is 15.3/15.4 and not macOS 16!

 

[justiny]

Since upgrading my 16-inch M1 Pro MBP to Sequoia's public release in September and discovering this new Time Machine "feature", I have searched through and tried every possible suggestion from here/Apple Support/Reddit/etc. I have tried reformatting the drive, switching to a different drive, excluding files, wiping snapshots, the Onyx app recommended earlier in this thread, toggling a mindless number of switches in settings, and so on. I have given up and resorted to dismissing the error every time I log in, and then a backup is started automatically. It's unbelievably annoying.

I am happy that others have found a solution or a workaround, but no joy for me. Unfortunately, for my machine, this is a bug only Apple can fix, so my only hope now is it gets fixed before 16.0.

 

[kagharaht]

Oh Adding Time Machine App to Full Disk access didn't work. My wife's MBA M2 15" this morning showed that error again. Perhaps because hers is set to default sleep in 10 min? I did the change on my iMac M3 also at the same time. The iMac has not showed the error, but the iMac M3 is set to never sleep. So I'll set her MBA to never sleep and see if that prevents TM from failing.

 

[McMario]

Meanwhile, I occasionally read all the posts about this topic & I still find it unbelievable that this / these issue(s) have not been resolved by 15.2

Even worse, I have not seen any acknowledgement from Apple, not to say fix for these serious problems.

I have followed all workaorunds, nothing helped.

So bad.

 

[Ital]

Oh Adding Time Machine App to Full Disk access didn't work. My wife's MBA M2 15" this morning showed that error again. Perhaps because hers is set to default sleep in 10 min? I did the change on my iMac M3 also at the same time. The iMac has not showed the error, but the iMac M3 is set to never sleep. So I'll set her MBA to never sleep and see if that prevents TM from failing.

mine does go to sleep after 5 minutes and never had any problem with TM , sorry to hear it did not work for you , it's odd this is working for some and not for others , nevertheless this being a safety feature for your data should never have this type of a problem, shameful apple shameful !!!

 

[DanShockley]

So, I read through that Apple Community post and I used the "log show --info --style compact --predicate '(subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine")' --last 24h" command and started browsing.

…


My question for everyone else is, do you have a FindMy widget on your Desktop or in your Notification Widgets? This is the only permission error I could find. It could be specific to the FindMy widget or that could just happen to be the file that is causing me issues.

I saw the same thing.
The bad news is the last time I had this same Time Machine backup error while my Mac was locked, it was a _different_ file.
So, I suspect this is going to randomly pop up here and there, as quality control appears to have blown it on allowing macOS Sequoia to run unattended/locked backups. That's a debacle, and one they should fix ASAP.

Currently, they are telling us we have to choose between:
A) insecure because outdated backups, or
B) insecure because Mac must be left unlocked for backups to be current.

That's ridiculous.

 

[iammike1]

I saw the same thing.
The bad news is the last time I had this same Time Machine backup error while my Mac was locked, it was a _different_ file.
So, I suspect this is going to randomly pop up here and there, as quality control appears to have blown it on allowing macOS Sequoia to run unattended/locked backups. That's a debacle, and one they should fix ASAP.

Currently, they are telling us we have to choose between:
A) insecure because outdated backups, or
B) insecure because Mac must be left unlocked for backups to be current.

That's ridiculous.

To be fair, I have no idea of removing FindMy from my desktop had anything at all to do with the eventual fix for me. I simply included it in my steps because those are the steps I took and once I fixed it, I wasn't trying to break it again to test my theories. lol

I know removing it alone didn't fix it but it was still removed when I did the purge of snapshots. Mine has been backing up while locked just fine since then.

 

[kagharaht]

Update: Never Sleep on the MBA 15" M2 with Mac OS 15.2 still gave that error. Oddly, the iMac M3 with Mac OS 15.2 set on never sleep has not given that error yet.

 

[RandyN]

Thank you for this thread. I had a long discussion with Apple Support this morning regarding this same Time Machine behavior as applied to my M3-series MacBook.

The Support rep (supervisor actually) said this is a "feature" for many of the M-series laptops. In essence, many of these machines do not have the Power Nap feature of prior machines and cannot backup if the screen saver is active or the display is off. The assertion makes no sense to me, but it is what it is. So, my M2 Mac mini can backup when in sleep/screen saver, but my M3 laptop cannot.

I submitted a bug report on the Apple feedback page and suggest other do so as well. https://www.apple.com/feedback

 

[iammike1]

That support rep "supervisor" doesn't know what they are talking about which, more times than not, seems to always be the case with customer support from most companies these days.

 

[RandyN]

That support rep "supervisor" doesn't know what they are talking about which, more times than not, seems to always be the case with customer support from most companies these days.

I don't dispute what you're saying. I just wanted to add my report to the mix.
The understanding I got during my conversation was similar to what DanShockley said above:

"Currently, they are telling us we have to choose between:​

A) insecure because outdated backups, or​

B) insecure because Mac must be left unlocked for backups to be current."​

​

Neither of those are a good solution in my view.

 

[kagharaht]

Even manually backing up the MBA M2, the error comes up when the screen goes to sleep in the middle of the Time Machine backup. This is so stupid Apple. I have sent feedback after feedback with each scenario I tried. The only way it doesn't error is if I don't let the MBA Sleep, Screen turn off and Auto lock. Or turn off lock automatically when sleeping. Leaving the MBA accessible to anyone when it wakes up....how stupid is that?