MP 6,1 TimeMachine woes

[flat4]

I am not looking for a fix it but more of a look here to try to find out why its doing this behavior.

Setup
TimeMachine is on a unraid NAS (setup as a SMB share specific to TimeMachine) I have enough space allotted so its bigger than the actual drive on the Trashcan. After the initial os installed of Monterey (came with El capitan) TM worked flawlessly. I gifted my iMac had two users I needed to move to the Trashcan. Completed a TM backup on the iMac and use steps to restore the 2 users on trashcan from the NAS share and this is where my problems began.
I also had carbon copy cloner doing a backup to the same share with no issues prior to the 2 user that were added.

Once my TM backups started to failed so did the CCC backup. Thinking I hosed the share I recreated it and tried and tried and still get the same behavior.

TM will start the backup run for maybe 20 minutes and then display Waiting on First Backup to complete. when I open the TM preferences
it tells me zero kb but its not .


I am certain that moving the two users caused the issue. Running first AID, clears the Trashcan SSD as ok.

I also have a cMP5,1 running open core on the latest monterey and TM is running flawlessly. The share it uses is on the same nas and setup the same way.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[mattspace]

ahhh, here's what I'm interpreting from your post is the problem...

TM backups are machine specific. You can't backup the iMac to a TM backup that was already being used by the Mac Pro as a way of transferring the iMac's user accounts to the backup, in order to then recover them to the Mac Pro.

Moving backups between machines is possible with the TMUTIL Inherit function, but that's for when you want to permanently change the backup source to a new machine when you've transferred a hard drive (or duplicated a HFS+ Time Machine disk to a larger drive - something that can only be done with SuperDuper!).

What Time Machine will likely have attempted to do is perform a whole new fresh backup of the entire iMac, leaving the Mac Pro backup untouched on disk.

What it may very well be doing while seeming inactive now you're back to the Mac Pro, is deleting your existing backups to make space for a new complete backup run.

What you should have done, is use Migration Assistant to import those two user accounts from the iMac to the Mac Pro directly, and then delete the user accounts from the iMac throgh the Users & Groups prefpane.

Granted, telling you what you should have done is not altogether helpful after it's already happened, but TM is finicky, especially post-APFS Snapshots. You may find it easier to just put that backup away, and start a new one from scratch.

 

[flat4]

Thank you for the reply, I need to make the correction that I in fact use the migration assistant to move users. I could not remember the term so I used TM. The iMac has long been wiped and reloaded.

Yes i longed trashed that backup and have tried to do fresh ones that is where I am at, it will not complete

I appreciate the help

 

[mattspace]

Thank you for the reply, I need to make the correction that I in fact use the migration assistant to move users. I could not remember the term so I used TM. The iMac has long been wiped and reloaded.

Yes i longed trashed that backup and have tried to do fresh ones that is where I am at, it will not complete

I appreciate the help

Ok, so you imported the users into the machine using Migration Assistant - the first thing I'd try is logging in to both of them and see if they work properly.

Then, if they're functional, I'd be inclined to start a fresh TM backup (perhaps after using TMUTIL to remove any local TM snapshots on the internal drive), and try a backup with those user accounts home directories added to TM's exclusions list - if the backup works, then add in one of the accounts, and try again, etc.

 

[flat4]

Hmm well I don't have any snapshots

thanks

 

[flat4]

Making some progress, at least I get the size of the disk rather than zero KB

I discovered that my firewall was the issue, it was blocking retries after the initial sparsebundle once i corrected this its been backing up. The only issue is that it states none for oldest and latest

I am letting back up and will try to restore an item that I have deleted

 

[flat4]

Wanted to update this, it did not get any better, I deleted files and let it backup over the weekend and when I go into the time machine to restore. It only displayed a backup from 2 hours ago. So i cannot restore the file.

So I did more searching on the unraid forums and found a post that stated to use a disk share rather than a network share.
Set it up and it seems to be working better