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Updated to 10.14.6, now Time Machine doesn't work

M

miretogo

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 19, 2014
137
134
Until today, I used 10.14.5 and Time Machine worked. Then, I installed 10.14.6 (due to macOS's annoying "reminders") and now Time Machine doesn't work anymore. To be more precise, the Time Machine drive doesn't mount. The drive does appear in Disk Utility (see attached screenshot) and First Aid shows no errors.

I also tried several USB ports and reset the PRAM without result.

Did/does anybody have the same problem? How can I solve this?
 

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  • Disk Utility.png
    Disk Utility.png
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I called Apple support. After an SMC reset, trying Recovery Mode, Safe Boot mode and several other things, the employee gave up and said I should reformat the HDD. I did that and now my first Time Machine backup failed after reaching 99% with the message "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup folder."

I have been using Time Machine for about 10 years now without problem but in the last 1-2 years I have had so many issues with it that it doesn't seem worth the trouble anymore. It takes me more time trying to bugfix Time Machien than manual backups would take. I will probably start looking for an alternative.
 
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I had no issues with Time Machine after 10.14.5 to 10.14.6. It's been flawless.

Apple's advice in this case seems a bit insane. It might have made more sense to do a clean install onto a USB drive and boot from there, and see if the Time Machine volume will mount. But it'a moot point now by the sounds of things. If you've been having problems for the last few years there may be an underlying problem specific to your install perhaps.

I would certainly replace that drive. Perhaps it's the drive that is the problem.
 
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I also began to suspect the drive but for some reason I could eventually mount and format it and have used it to flawlessly back up about 200 GB with Carbon Copy Cloner.

After thinking about possible backup strategies for a while, I decided to go with the following:
  • External HDD 1 with Time Machine: automatic hourly backups
  • External HDD 2 with Carbon Copy Cloner: automatic daily backups
  • External HDD 3: manual weekly backups
 
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I would review the S.M.A.R.T stats for the drive if you can.

There are five specific indicators that are worth checking:
SMART indicators.png



Here's a half decent article:

What SMART Hard Disk Errors Actually Tell Us

Have you ever wondered what your hard drive SMART errors actually mean? Find out what we look at to determine if a drive is about to fail.
www.backblaze.com www.backblaze.com
 
That's intersting. Unfortunately, Disk Utility only shows the SMART status for the internal Fusion Drive. For my two external hard drives it states that SMART status is "Not Supported". Is it possible that Disk Utility only shows the SMART status for internal drives?
 
Yeah macOS doesn't show S.M.A.R.T stats for external drives.

There are some third party utilities like this:

DriveDx - the most advanced drive health diagnostics and monitoring utility

DriveDx - the most advanced drive health (S.M.A.R.T.) diagnostics and monitoring utility. Save yourself the data loss and downtime that is associated with unexpected SSD and HDD failures. Don't worry about losing your important data, music, and photographs.
binaryfruit.com binaryfruit.com
 
Thanks again for your help. According to DriveDX, the external hard drive which didn't mount for a while and which I suspected to be damaged, is in perfect health (100% for all indicators). If that is true, then I wonder why macOS couldn't mount it and, when it was finally mounted, couldn't unmount it. Seems like a macOS bug.
 
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Good to know the drive is ok. Odd about macOS but nice to know the drive is trustworthy.
 
I now decided to use external hard drives for backups: One using Time Machine, another using Carbon Copy Cloner. However, Time Machine seems really buggy. For example, it updated the encryption progress only after restarting. For example, it showed 38% for hours and after a restart suddenly showed 54%. This happened every time. The progress was never updates while it was encrypting.
 
I dont really understand how Apple allocates CPU cycles for encryption to be honest. On a T2 based Mac I guess it’s done through that? But on my non-T2 based Mac it is the CPU doing the work. I wound have thought I would see some sort of activity in Activity Monitor corresponding to the encryption process. If the CPU has idle cycles why not let it use them for encryption? But it seems like even when the CPU is idle it still crawls during the process.

Admittedly that was 10.14.0, the last time I encrypted an external drive. Perhaps even 10.13.x.

All the same, you don’t need to wait for it to do it’s thing. You can use and eject the drive as normal and it will just do backups etc. Eject the drive while it’s encrypting and it will resume when you plug it in again. It is strange but it works (for my anyway).
 
miretogo said:
I now decided to use external hard drives for backups: One using Time Machine, another using Carbon Copy Cloner. However, Time Machine seems really buggy. For example, it updated the encryption progress only after restarting. For example, it showed 38% for hours and after a restart suddenly showed 54%. This happened every time. The progress was never updates while it was encrypting.
Click to expand...
Sounds like there might be some corruption on your main drive that is causing TM to fail. Try running Apple Diagnostics.

Use Apple Diagnostics to test your Mac – Apple Support (AU)

Apple Diagnostics, formerly known as Apple Hardware Test, can check your Mac for hardware issues.
support.apple.com support.apple.com
 
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