Time Machine - Showing Not Backed Up

[emac82]

My Dad has a MBP (2013 I think) with El Capitan.

He does regular time machine back ups (usually every few months).

He completed one last weekend, and it showed completed before he disconnected. But later, TM gave him a warning that he hadn't backed up in 90 days. So when I visited, I did another TM backup, and it showed completed. but the next day he called me and it says it hasn't been backed up in 92 days or whatever it was.

When I open up the TM backups, the recent ones aren't listed there. Any suggestions? I live in another province, and COVID just burst our bubble, so I can't go in person to troubleshoot at the moment.

 

[Brian33]

It sure sounds like the backups are not completing successfully.

The easiest thing to do is to start over with a fresh backup series. He'd lose his previous backup history. You don't mention whether TM is backing up to an attached drive or to a network device like a Time Capsule. In either case, you could just have him erase the drive (as MacOS Extended, Journalled) and start fresh. A backup history is nice to have, but one shouldn't use it to save files that don't exist elsewhere...

If you'd like to pursue other options, keep in mind that you can use iMessage to have him share his screen with you, even over the internet. That way you can poke around and enter commands, etc on his Mac (with his permission, of course).

Are you comfortable entering Terminal commands? Here's one that will show you all TM log messages since a given date (yesterday's as an example):

log show --style syslog  --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --info --start 2020-11-28

Be aware that you will likely see a bunch of error messages, even during a successful backup -- many are not important. Look first for lines containing "Backup completed" or "Backup failed".