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queensdee223

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 23, 2023
7
4
NYC
edit: So I'm now looking at full progress bar in the preference pane and it's counting down from ≈860 GB. `tmutil status` reports `BackupPhase` is `Copying`.

Does anybody know what the difference phases are and what they signify? `man tmutil` is unhelpful and I'm finding nothing online. Thanks!

Original post follows:

Hi, all. I've had my 2014 Mac Mini booted in safe mode backing up to my NAS for a few days. Finally, it looked like it was done. The Time Machine backup preference pane said "preparing backup" rather than list a time remaining, and `tmutil status` said it was a 1% and showed no `TimeRemaining` property. I figured this meant my first backup to the NAS was done and I decided I'd skip the backup so I could change some settings on my NAS.

Then I saw Time Machine reporting there was no last backup, and `tmutil listbackups` shows `No backups found for host` or `No machine directory found for host`. Sometimes it takes a VERY long time for the command to finish.

If I connect to the SMB share, there's a `my-machine-name.sparsebundle`bundle, and that bundle takes up 802.85 GB according to the Finder.

What am I doing wrong? The reason I want to do this backup is because something about this computer is janky -- it's way old and I've done a TON of tinkering with the sytem over the years. My preference is not to do a macOS reinstall without a Time Machine backup that itself is redundantly backed up.

Any advice? Thanks!
 
Last edited:
So I took the leap and reinstalled macOS, and now Time Machine is working -- just in time to have already done the reinstall I wanted to do after the backup 🤣 I haven't gone through all my usual workflows, but Firefox also seems faster, so I'm cautiously optimistic.

I also did change from encrypted Time Machine to unencrypted and am doing the encryption on the sync up from my NAS to BackBlaze.
 
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