What causes Time Machine to stall during backups?

February 4th. Hi Lee! In all my years of participating in discussions in the Community I have never found myself so bamboozled concerning finding responses to posts and trying to word posts so that they don't get deleted. dbrewood had recently posted that he solved the problem. But I think he then wrote a follow-up post that the backups started to fail again. I'll have to go through all the comments and note the dates to confirm that the follow-up post was acutally to his earlier post that he thought he had fixed the problem. As you know, I have installed Carbon Copy Cloner on both Mac Minis of my household. It continues to work admirably. I have an iMac I want to gift to my daughter's son, but before I do I would like to get Time Machine running reliably on it. I know the job of a Moderator is a thankless one and I have never been one to try to be disrespectful toward them. And I am not trying to be disrespectful here. I appreciate what they do. But this discussion is messed up and it is making it even harder to try to resolve the problem with Time Machine backups. I sure hope this post doesn't get deleted. <Pray Emoji>

good day to you, luigi. you know, it should be easy to respond to comments. it's not. sad. i recently updated to 15.3 on both of my mac minis and my macbook. all are running ™ backups to completion. so far.

bruiselee13 wrote:

good day to you, luigi. you know, it should be easy to respond to comments. it's not. sad. i recently updated to 15.3 on both of my mac minis and my macbook. all are running ™ backups to completion. so far.

As I've pointed out before, if you sort the thread by "oldest" and include the comment you're responding to - as I have above - it makes makes it much easier to follow the thread of comments. They're not the greatest boards for threading, but you and the others complaining about how difficult it is to follow things really are making it more difficult for yourselves.

Zurarczurx wrote:

As I've pointed out before, if you sort the thread by "oldest" and include the comment you're responding to - as I have above - it makes makes it much easier to follow the thread of comments. They're not the greatest boards for threading, but you and the others complaining about how difficult it is to follow things really are making it more difficult for yourselves.

Hi Zurarczurx! Because my comments were default sorted by "Rank," I missed your original post reminding us to look for that itsy, bitsy, teeny, weeny button to change the sorting options. Having said that, why my comments were sorted by "Rank" baffles me because I set my preferences to sort by "Oldest" years ago. Anyway, thanks for your reminder post. I reset my preferences to "Oldest" and now there is sanity to this discussion.

Hi dbre! I was excited when I read your first comment which aggressively pointed to a guilty Home widget. But, then I read your follow-up and even though a reboot seems to have fixed it, I am less excited. Why? This completely reminds me of the problem I had for a LONG time with “unlocking my Mac” using my Apple Watch. I kept trying to find the culprit and every once in a while something would surface that appeared to work for a while only to have the failure to unlock return. It turns out the problem had NOTHING to do with ANY of the things I tried that occasionally looked promising. BTW, if you’re curious what the REAL problem was, it turned out to be that I had gone deep into settings when I first bought my 2018 Mac Mini and turned ON “Log out after 1 hour of inactivity.” I didn’t know that if you’re logged out of your machine, the Apple Watch will not “Unlock My Mac.” This dangerous move was not mentioned in Apple’s “Unlock my Mac” literature back then. I have noticed they DO include the instruction to not turn on “log out after…” in their current literature. Anyway, not to be a Debbie Downer. I do home the Home Widget IS the culprit and this solves your problem forever. If I was using TM (and not Carbon Copy Cloner 7), I would install the Home widget so we could get more data. Maybe someone here who is using TM and has no problems could install the Home widget and see what happens? You know…in the spirit of science. 😊

The tale continues. TM backups are still continuing without any issues when the Mac is locked.

One thing I'll be looking to re-test is the Home Widget, I will be adding it back in later. Why you ask......

Well I had removed it as you know on the Mac, but have it in place on the iPhone. When I came to use it last night I noted the 'tile' for the desk keyboard light was saying 'no response', tapping on it did nothing.

New the lightstrip I have under my desk (and above the keyboard drawer) is a Nanoleaf product. I went into the Nanoleaf app on the iPhone and was advised I needed to update the firmware. I was on version 3.6.196 and the latest version was 4.13, so quite a way behind. Anyway that has ben updated and the tile on the iPhone widget now works.

So....... that makes me think was this firmware 'problem' also affecting the widget on the Mac? No ideas, but I want to see if the backups remain stable (as I've a few bits of 'awkward' software to install today).

If things are looking good I'll add the widget again and report back as to how it goes.

Hi dbre! I don't have any Nonoleaf products so I have nothing to offer there. But I did want to write to commend you on your Sherlock Holmes skill set in hopefully solving this problem in your use case. Well done. 👏👏👏 P.S. I wish many of these IoT products had a better notification system for letting you know when updates are available.

Thanks Luigi. The point in my mentioning the Nanoleaf firmware issue was not to criticise them but to highlight the possible issue of third party Homekit devices interfering with systems. My systems have been perfectly working for nearly 3 days now without an issue. However I'm not considering it fixed yet, more testing is needed before I'll be happy.

The last Apple issue I had to resolve took over 14 months before I resolved it, Apple gave up, but that one I determined was caused by a rogue app.

I've been testing software as a side-line for over 35 years now so I'm patient enough to go through the steps needed to resolve issues. As a retired Production Engineer and IT Engineer / Manager I've got an unusual skill set which suits this sort of investigation, plus I never ever give up. :)

Anyway onwards and upwards....

Okay thanks I'll format the external drives and wipe the NAS partition then before going through with the procedure.

Does anyone know if Apple fixed this problem in the upcoming Sequoia 15.1 update?

Eh..... turn off the Firewall? Why? Are there issues with it?

I would have thought it'd be a major security issue if it was turned off?

I'm running 15.1 here and still have the issue. Unless you mean the forthcoming 15.2 update?

Indeed I do!

Heck I'd not heard of it causing issues (or causing this one), is it a known issue?

Understood, hoping they do fix it in 15.2!

Well, I tried it all again this time with the firewall off. And as you can see it didn't make a ****** bit of a difference.

I can see that I'll have to raise it as a bug with Apple......