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netnothing

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Original poster
Mar 13, 2007
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Anyone else seeing where Time Machine is skipping hourly backups under Sonoma?

I had an issue with external drives after updating to Sonoma. That caused me to adjust some external drives, one of them being a TM backup disk. This is an external encrypted 4 TB HDD. I wiped the drive and started Time Machine over fresh. TM is backing up my Mac Studio internal drive and one other external drive.

Everything seems to be working fine expect that I notice that TM is skipping backups in the evening. You can see from the screenshot that yesterday it skipped backups after the 5:43PM backup - until the this morning at 6:08AM.

My Mac never sleeps. The drives are never spun down.

The only thing I can think of was that sometime after 5PM I did lock my machine, and I don't think I used it again last night until this morning, around the 6:08AM timeframe.

Are Apple skipping TM backups if the Mac is locked under Sonoma?
 

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Anyone else seeing where Time Machine is skipping hourly backups under Sonoma?

I had an issue with external drives after updating to Sonoma. That caused me to adjust some external drives, one of them being a TM backup disk. This is an external encrypted 4 TB HDD. I wiped the drive and started Time Machine over fresh. TM is backing up my Mac Studio internal drive and one other external drive.

Everything seems to be working fine expect that I notice that TM is skipping backups in the evening. You can see from the screenshot that yesterday it skipped backups after the 5:43PM backup - until the this morning at 6:08AM.

My Mac never sleeps. The drives are never spun down.

The only thing I can think of was that sometime after 5PM I did lock my machine, and I don't think I used it again last night until this morning, around the 6:08AM timeframe.

Are Apple skipping TM backups if the Mac is locked under Sonoma?
My TM has been taking forever to complete backup since "upgrading?" to Sonoma. Apple support says it's because the new operating system is "re-indexing" the disk?
Ols advice of waiting a bit on upgrades for Apple to work out the bugs is the best.
I'll do that next time.
 
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My TM has been taking forever to complete backup since "upgrading?" to Sonoma. Apple support says it's because the new operating system is "re-indexing" the disk?
Ols advice of waiting a bit on upgrades for Apple to work out the bugs is the best.
I'll do that next time.
After upgrading to Sonoma, my TM continually says skipping backups and never changes. Clicking on skipping backup does not change anything either. Am I going to have to reformat my drive and start over?
 
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After upgrading to Sonoma, my TM continually says skipping backups and never changes. Clicking on skipping backup does not change anything either. Am I going to have to reformat my drive and start over?
I have a 5TB drive coming in tomorrow. I'll format that and introduce it to Time Machine and hope the play well (faster) together.
 
So I locked my Mac shortly after 5pm. It's now 6:16pm and I unlocked and noticed that didn't do the backup at ~5:50pm. In the menubar it said delayed.

When I opened TM prefs it had this window.

Time Machine couldn't complete the backup to "MacBackup"
Time Machine did not finish backing up because some files were unavailable.
Backups will resume when your Mac is unlocked.

Anyone have any idea what this means?

Like I mentioned, I don't put ANY disks to sleep on my Mac, and my Mac itself wasn't asleep, just had the screen locked.
 

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Someone on reddit posted to use this command to see files that were unavailable:

Code:
log show --info --style compact --predicate '(subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine") && (eventMessage like[cd] "Failed * acquire device lock assertion*")' --last 24h

This is what my machine returned:

Code:
2023-10-05 03:46:04.836 E  backupd[625:1d3dbe] [com.apple.TimeMachine:FileProtection] Failed to proactively acquire device lock assertion on lock state change (deviceIsLocked), assertion state: <dropped>, error: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=1 "Operation not permitted"
2023-10-05 03:47:45.327 E  backupd[625:1d3d35] [com.apple.TimeMachine:FileProtection] Failed to acquire device lock assertion for '/Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/machinename/2023-10-05-034531/MacHD - Data/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems/Data/SystemData/com.apple.chrono/snapshots/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems/systemSmall--8516498320056292854----164.00w--164.00h--20.00r--0f--0.00t-0.00l-0.00b0.00t.chrono-timeline' (assertion state: <dropped>), error: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=1 "Operation not permitted"
2023-10-05 04:49:14.784 E  backupd[625:1db2b4] [com.apple.TimeMachine:FileProtection] Failed to proactively acquire device lock assertion on lock state change (deviceIsLocked), assertion state: <dropped>, error: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=1 "Operation not permitted"
2023-10-05 04:51:02.080 E  backupd[625:1dacb1] [com.apple.TimeMachine:FileProtection] Failed to acquire device lock assertion for '/Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/machinename/2023-10-05-044554/MacHD - Data/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems/Data/SystemData/com.apple.chrono/snapshots/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems/systemSmall--8516498320056292854----164.00w--164.00h--20.00r--0f--0.00t-0.00l-0.00b0.00t.chrono-timeline' (assertion state: <dropped>), error: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=1 "Operation not permitted"
2023-10-05 05:46:40.918 E  backupd[625:1e1bff] [com.apple.TimeMachine:FileProtection] Failed to proactively acquire device lock assertion on lock state change (deviceIsLocked), assertion state: <dropped>, error: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=1 "Operation not permitted"
2023-10-05 05:48:20.710 E  backupd[625:1e1bbc] [com.apple.TimeMachine:FileProtection] Failed to acquire device lock assertion for '/Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/machinename/2023-10-05-054603/MacHD - Data/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems/Data/SystemData/com.apple.chrono/snapshots/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems/systemSmall--8516498320056292854----164.00w--164.00h--20.00r--0f--0.00t-0.00l-0.00b0.00t.chrono-timeline' (assertion state: <dropped>), error: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=1 "Operation not permitted"
2023-10-05 17:51:30.111 E  backupd[625:264a8a] [com.apple.TimeMachine:FileProtection] Failed to acquire device lock assertion for '/Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/machinename/2023-10-05-174957/MacHD - Data/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems/Data/SystemData/com.apple.chrono/snapshots/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems/systemSmall--8516498320056292854----164.00w--164.00h--20.00r--0f--0.00t-0.00l-0.00b0.00t.chrono-timeline' (assertion state: <dropped>), error: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=1 "Operation not permitted"

Not sure I have any idea what this means? Anyone have a clue?
 
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So I found some reports online that talk about this problem going back to Montery. Same issue with com.apple.findmy.FindMy* causing TM backups to not complete. So far it seems my situation is a bit unique in that TM completes fine, but only when unlocked.

Last night I added all those paths as an exclusion in TM to test via this command:

Code:
tmutil addexclusion -p ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy*

That added the following paths to the exclusion list:

Code:
/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy,
/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetPeople,
/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetIntentsPeople,
/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyNotificationsServiceExtension,
/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems,
/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetIntentsItems

After doing that, TM backed up normally all night while my machine was locked.

I did submit a bug report, but don't really expect Apple to bother since this seems to be a long standing issue. Hopefully this helps if someone else is having a similar issue.
 
So I locked my Mac shortly after 5pm. It's now 6:16pm and I unlocked and noticed that didn't do the backup at ~5:50pm. In the menubar it said delayed.

When I opened TM prefs it had this window.



Anyone have any idea what this means?

Like I mentioned, I don't put ANY disks to sleep on my Mac, and my Mac itself wasn't asleep, just had the screen locked.
Same here.
Something is wrong with Time Machine and Sonoma...
 
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Same here.
Something is wrong with Time Machine and Sonoma...
You can try running this command in Terminal to see what files are preventing TM from backing up.

Code:
log show --info --style compact --predicate '(subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine") && (eventMessage like[cd] "Failed * acquire device lock assertion*")' --last 24h
 
My problem seems to be that Time Machine always seems to back up everything from the scratch all over again and again...
so the Time Machine drive is getting full really fast and only keeps 2 or 3 backups...
 
came here to add that I'm having the same problem....

Update: I removed the Find My Widget from the desktop and TM no longer throws the error.
 
Last edited:
So I found some reports online that talk about this problem going back to Montery. Same issue with com.apple.findmy.FindMy* causing TM backups to not complete. So far it seems my situation is a bit unique in that TM completes fine, but only when unlocked.

Last night I added all those paths as an exclusion in TM to test via this command:

Code:
tmutil addexclusion -p ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy*

That added the following paths to the exclusion list:

Code:
/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy,
/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetPeople,
/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetIntentsPeople,
/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyNotificationsServiceExtension,
/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems,
/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetIntentsItems

After doing that, TM backed up normally all night while my machine was locked.

I did submit a bug report, but don't really expect Apple to bother since this seems to be a long standing issue. Hopefully this helps if someone else is having a similar issue.
When I received my new iMac I was playing around the keep awake or let it sleep settings to see which I prefer. iMac M3 24gb/8/10/2TB. In Mac OS 14.3, If I manually put the iMac to Sleep. Time Machine did not backup while sleeping. Only after waking it up the next day, did it start backing up. If I let the iMac sleep on its own (which I normally don't, I keep it awake and just the screen off) Time Machine will do its backup while the iMac is sleeping throughout the night and day.

The new updated installed. 14.3.1 and I'm gonna let it auto sleep and see if it backup overnight. Then I'll do never sleep and manually sleep it and see if it TM backups doing that tomorrow.
 
Last edited:
TM is working normally after 14.3.1 update with either scenarios I posted.
 
I started having this problem too. I can't stress enough that you've got to check in the terminal for which file(s) are causing the problem. in my case it was ~/Library/Weather/com.apple.weather so clearly we who have the problems all have slightly different problematic files. After excluding this - no issue. And I can't really see the downside!
 
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