Welcome to the club friend. I bet they don't know even about that junk issue. I know many will laugh with my comment but i will give apple some days more. After that i sell all my products. And no i don't want to buy ccc. Thanks.
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Resolved Time machine experiencing multiple issues on Monterey (my personal issue resolved)
- Thread starter MacinMan
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After reviewing the terminal errors one more time, I saw that the `find my` files were mentioned at the end. There post a few before this one that mention excluding those. I excluded those files and the backup went though successfully. After every other solution nd buying a new hard drive, this is the only thing that has resolved it.
When searching in Finder they appear as `com.apple.findmy...` but when searching in excluded items in Time Machine they are just under Findlay in the Containers Folder. I am still going to continue escalating this through Apple Support to their Engineers to they can fix this issue across the board, but for now, I hope this helps some folks.
That's one of the most frustrating things people keep bringing up here. The FindMy related stuff is causing TM to fail, but usually they're located in the user's Library so they aren't system files. I'm running on a late 2015, 27" iMac and I have FindMy enabled, and to my knowledge, I've never had issues with those files. I know there are people on Apple Silicon machines that haven't either. However, it seems like it affects a certain group of people that keep showing up here, but NOT everyone. Earlier in the thread, there was mention that someone received a response from Apple Engineers suggesting they had tracked it down to a problem with APFS snapshots, or other APFS related issues. No one ever reported back with further details regarding that: Just that Apple had advised against using Time Machine until it was fixed because it could potentially cause harm.
i try all those you mention also. Nothing works. The thing that pissed me off is that no one from apple doesn't state something. they don't know we can't work?
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I was making the point that even Apple themselves had started advising people not to use TM until this was fixed. I think as a courtesy they are even offering discounted licenses for CCC, I don't know if they do superduper or not, as well.
i spend so much money on Apple products and the only thing that not gave me is their courtesy.
I definitely see that others has had sporadic issues. For one, I have had variable/inconsistent errors throughout this whole process. For one, I’m happy it finally worked. For another, I’m still pissed that it’s taking this long and I still don’t know for sure what’s caused it.
I know others have escalated this as well, but I’m hoping something comes from this. Not using TN after months of the issue being present is obviously not an acceptable answer form the team. In addition, every error I’ve had along the way has been different…in my mind, it’s just a coincidence this solution worked, but obviously doesn’t meant the solution if solved.
I’m not saying/hopeful my track will provide a solid answer, but can’t hurt for one more person to pressure them towards a fix
I know others have escalated this as well, but I’m hoping something comes from this. Not using TN after months of the issue being present is obviously not an acceptable answer form the team. In addition, every error I’ve had along the way has been different…in my mind, it’s just a coincidence this solution worked, but obviously doesn’t meant the solution if solved.
I’m not saying/hopeful my track will provide a solid answer, but can’t hurt for one more person to pressure them towards a fix
The funny thing is that so long (after update to monterey) i was think that the TM is ok. And before some days i realize that is not working on my new external hard drive. So i enter here and make a post. After i found that thread here i almost vomit. And no i don't want to pay not even another euro to apple or to ccc team until the problem is fixed. For now i hold my older backups and i hope nothing serious happens with my data.....
It's one of the downsides of adopting features like this into daily routines etc. Most of the time it just works, but then like now, people are having problems and because not everyone has taken the time to establish alternative options for when things go wrong. So it causes people a lot more frustration in the end. I use TM for the most part, because It just works. However, If I wasn't able to have resolved the issue I opened this thread with I would have had CCC, or SuperDuper as alternatives, and probably iCloud drives as well a maybe Google drive, etc, at least for important documents.
If you already have reliable backups of what you need. Don't worry about making new ones until it's fixed. In fact, I would disconnect those drives and put them in a safe place. With the issues going on, you could lose your old backups potentially if you were to keep trying to get things to work.
Do you know if the drag and drop method from applications and other folders works?
For those who have problems with M1. Wipe the backup disk. Setup as new TM again and before backup, put in terminal: tmutil addexclusion ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy*
I've always done my restores that way. I simply let TM backup then if I have to restore (say after doing a clean install) I put back manually what I need, and everything else I clean install / configure. Several years ago I tried a TM restore, and didn't like it so I've always manually copied files back. The ONLY thing that really makes TM worth me using over Carbon Copy Cloner, or SuperDuper!, etc is the fact that it lets you go back and restore files from various backup versions of the file on the fly. Beyond that CCC, or SD really are just as good, or better options when it comes to reliability. It depends on who you talk to, but in my experience, TM works OK, but has also given me problems in the past long before Monterey, or Apple Silicon were a thing: so I just never really fully trusted it without having other solutions at hand as well.
Clearly, TM will fail for a few different reasons and many people here are experiencing different or a combination of different issues.
I too upgraded to a new 16" M1 Max MBP and TM failed ever since.
What ultimately worked for me was excluding the 4 problematic FindMy folders & excluding the ~/Library/Metadata folder as well.
Since 12/29 my TM backups succeeded and I've waited until today to post my results to confirm that it still works almost a week later.
A few more details and notes that may be of interest to any of you:
Good luck to everyone.
I too upgraded to a new 16" M1 Max MBP and TM failed ever since.
What ultimately worked for me was excluding the 4 problematic FindMy folders & excluding the ~/Library/Metadata folder as well.
Since 12/29 my TM backups succeeded and I've waited until today to post my results to confirm that it still works almost a week later.
A few more details and notes that may be of interest to any of you:
- my drive is not formatted in APFS, but is still HFS+ and that's because I kept my last backup from my previous Intel MBP on the same drive. So seems like APFS is not the reason for this issue.
- Some have deleted the FindMy folders from their Mac and that has resolved the issue, but only temporarily. I suspect that's because macOS may re-create those folders so deleting them is not a good workaround. What you should do instead is exclude those folders from the Time Machine backup.
- In my case, like many others, TM seemed to finish but it actually said waiting to complete ... I did try Safe Mode and First Aid on both the macOS internal drive and the TM drive, but none seemed to help. Then excluding the FindMy folders did cause those "pending completion of first backup" messages to stop showing up, but the backup still failed and never really completed. So not clear if running TM in safe mode and/or running First Aid did something or not. Maybe it did, maybe not. Ultimately, adding the Metadata folder to the exclude list was the final fix for me.
- If none of the solutions from this thread help you to resolve the TM issue, you should check out the log files and see if it fails on any specific file or folder not mentioned here. If it does, add it to the exclude list.
What we've learned from this saga is that there probably is no specific hardware issue causing this and simply excluding a few files will ultimately get TM to complete.
To check the log file, I suggest running the following in terminal:
log show --style syslog --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --info > tmlog.txt
This may take a while to complete, but wait. Then go over the file tmlog.txt - When the problem does occur, before you get it resolved, there will be a huge backup file with inProgress in its name. This is a partial backup and you can actually do a "Show Package Contents" on it and start browsing inside your backed up files (at least I can with HFS+, maybe this is now restricted with the Read-Only APFS???)
When TM fires back up, it will pick up this inProgress file and use it to continue to back up what else needs to be backed up. In my multiple trials before I got it resolved, I often deleted this file to start from scratch. But I then realized that wasn't necessary and leaving that file in place actually made the next attempt run faster, until I finally got it resolved.
I did turn off automatic backups until I got this resolved and ran test backups manually. - When the next Monterey update comes out we should remember to remove those directories from the exclude list and see if Apple got these issues resolved. If not, put them back and wait for the next update.
Good luck to everyone.
This is a great summary and suggestion.
In case someone wants to just look for the specific class of failures that have been prevalent in this thread, you can use the following search predicate to look for "Failed to proactively acquire device lock assertion" and "Failed to acquire device lock assertion" messages to help you isolate which folders to add to your exclusions:
log show --info --style compact --predicate '(subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine") && (eventMessage like[cd] "Failed * acquire device lock assertion*")'Adding the following exclusions via the terminal has fixed this issue for me:
sudo tmutil addexclusion -p ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidget*
sudo tmutil addexclusion -p ~/Library/Metadata
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I reached out to the technician I originally spoke to and he said engineering is still working to find a fix for time machine issues with no estimated release date for a fix
Hi folks, sorry, I did not read the complete thread, so please forgive me if this solution has already been posted before. Better twice than never, I'd say.
For the issue with Time Machine not completing the first backup, I have found the solution described here. Please let me know if it works for you.
The issue seems to be that the Find My functionality creates files that are protected in a way that they can't be accessed by Time Machine (which definitely is a bug). We must exclude these files from the backup to enable Time Machine to complete it. However, since I did so, the backups run smoothly here.
For the issue with Time Machine not completing the first backup, I have found the solution described here. Please let me know if it works for you.
The issue seems to be that the Find My functionality creates files that are protected in a way that they can't be accessed by Time Machine (which definitely is a bug). We must exclude these files from the backup to enable Time Machine to complete it. However, since I did so, the backups run smoothly here.
Hey, that's one of the more common solutions posted here, but thanks for posting again. The issues also seem to be connected to Apple Silicon machines as well as there are very few reports of Intel users having the same problems.
I've been running time machine faithfully on this late 2015 iMac after resolving the speed issues, and Find My is enabled, but I haven't had to exclude anything for the backup to complete.
I’ve noticed that, after a while, some apps create data in ~/Library/Containers causing Time Machine to fail again, so I excluded this directory as well.
As for Intel vs. M1, I can say that we have two new M1 MacBook Pro in our family, but my son’s didn’t have any issues, although I do believe I’ve set it up in the same way as mine. Very odd.
Ok, I am still waiting for a few more backups to confirm it's really working but here is what worked for me. Hopefully it can help others:
- Typed
log show --style syslog --last 30m --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --info --debugin Terminal. This shows what Time Machine was doing for the last 30 minutes. - Look for any files or directories with "Failed" or "Errors" message.
- Add those directories to your Time Machine exclusion list. In my case, they are:
~/Library/Containers~/Library/Metadata~/Library/Shortcuts
- Cross your fingers and try backing up again.
Thanks, PixelSushiRobot, for the very clear summary. For my case, there are additional user accounts set up in my M1 iMac and other users have their own directories above. For each user account, its directories above must be excluded. That is just my 2 cents.
Even with the workarounds to force Time Machine to function, I question its reliability if needed for a total system restore. Twice, on two new M1 systems, I encountered that a migration from a time machine would get stuck when migrating to an M1 machine from an Intel MAC created TM, while migrating from from Mac to Mac (same source MAC that had created the TM) worked. This is not a minor bug, and I am surprised Apple has taken this long to push a fix when they acknowledged the issue long ago. Maybe engineering is stumped has not figure out how to solve this. I would think the backup component of their latest OS would be a priority. Technically, in many jurisdictions when there is a known manufacturing defect (one could argue this is a known defect) the warranty does not run. I encourage everyone to document this error with Apple with specific date of purchase and until the defect is corrected. A year (or 3 years if Applecare) may be handy to demand a warranty extension that can be months long depending on purchase date).
Excluding the ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy* files and folders worked for me (MacBook Pro 16" M1 Pro). I had to do it in Terminal since the offending files and folders are not visible in the exclusions Finder selection window in the Time Machine GUI.
I used the -p flag to make the tmutil CLI exclusions show up in the GUI. I had to temporarily grant Terminal "Full Disk Access" for the command to execute.
I used the -p flag to make the tmutil CLI exclusions show up in the GUI. I had to temporarily grant Terminal "Full Disk Access" for the command to execute.