Time Machine can crash M2 MacBook Air

[gvigers]

I'm posting this as a new thread, but it may be related to several other threads here about weird crashes with M1 or M2 Macs.

A few days ago my wife's M2 MacBook Air started crashing every hour or so. The mag-safe light would flicker and then the machine would reboot with no error message or log files. We tried 2 different chargers and 2 different cables, to no effect. We then discovered that when running on battery it would not crash (even overnight), but if we plugged it in it would crash within 3 minutes.

We took it to the Apple store (who were great) but it wouldn't crash there at all! So apparently not hardware but something to do with our home setup. To cut a long story short it turned out that one of my TimeMachine backups (running on a NAS) was corrupted and as soon as TimeMachine tried to access it, the computer kernel-panicked/core dumped. I wiped the backup partition, made a new one, and everything has been hunky-dory since.

But here's the problem: A corrupted backup shouldn't cause a kernel panic. Yet it does on this M2 machine (running fully updated OS 12.6.1). And because TimeMachine runs in the background and only runs when the macbook is connected to a power source, it looks like a power problem. Or maybe a problem with the software you are running at the time? Or maybe your monitor? Definitely a hard case to diagnose! I haven't seen this problem with any of my older Macs.

I just wanted to put this out there in case it helps anyone else.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Is it possible the problem is from the NAS communication with the Mac? Does the NAS use a driver to connect and allow services from the Mac?

 

[SummerSalt]

I'm posting this as a new thread, but it may be related to several other threads here about weird crashes with M1 or M2 Macs.

A few days ago my wife's M2 MacBook Air started crashing every hour or so. The mag-safe light would flicker and then the machine would reboot with no error message or log files. We tried 2 different chargers and 2 different cables, to no effect. We then discovered that when running on battery it would not crash (even overnight), but if we plugged it in it would crash within 3 minutes.

We took it to the Apple store (who were great) but it wouldn't crash there at all! So apparently not hardware but something to do with our home setup. To cut a long story short it turned out that one of my TimeMachine backups (running on a NAS) was corrupted and as soon as TimeMachine tried to access it, the computer kernel-panicked/core dumped. I wiped the backup partition, made a new one, and everything has been hunky-dory since.

But here's the problem: A corrupted backup shouldn't cause a kernel panic. Yet it does on this M2 machine (running fully updated OS 12.6.1). And because TimeMachine runs in the background and only runs when the macbook is connected to a power source, it looks like a power problem. Or maybe a problem with the software you are running at the time? Or maybe your monitor? Definitely a hard case to diagnose! I haven't seen this problem with any of my older Macs.

I just wanted to put this out there in case it helps anyone else.

I'm posting this as a new thread, but it may be related to several other threads here about weird crashes with M1 or M2 Macs.

A few days ago my wife's M2 MacBook Air started crashing every hour or so. The mag-safe light would flicker and then the machine would reboot with no error message or log files. We tried 2 different chargers and 2 different cables, to no effect. We then discovered that when running on battery it would not crash (even overnight), but if we plugged it in it would crash within 3 minutes.

We took it to the Apple store (who were great) but it wouldn't crash there at all! So apparently not hardware but something to do with our home setup. To cut a long story short it turned out that one of my TimeMachine backups (running on a NAS) was corrupted and as soon as TimeMachine tried to access it, the computer kernel-panicked/core dumped. I wiped the backup partition, made a new one, and everything has been hunky-dory since.

But here's the problem: A corrupted backup shouldn't cause a kernel panic. Yet it does on this M2 machine (running fully updated OS 12.6.1). And because TimeMachine runs in the background and only runs when the macbook is connected to a power source, it looks like a power problem. Or maybe a problem with the software you are running at the time? Or maybe your monitor? Definitely a hard case to diagnose! I haven't seen this problem with any of my older Macs.

I just wanted to put this out there in case it helps anyone else.

Time Machine is crashing intel based iMacs— or at least mine. Two in two years. First one June 2021- out of the box issues. Took months to get them to replace it because they blamed it on me. Turns out it was a big issue. Now two years later my iMac is crashing, kernel panic, etc and disk utility reveals it’s related to Time Machine. Won’t repair it in recovery mode so the computer is f’d once again. Time Machine is extremely problematic and Apple wants to blame the user.

 

[dizmonk]

Why not just upgrade the OS? I'm on Sonoma which is 14.0