What causes Time Machine to stall during backups?

Hi bruiselle, Sadly, just connecting one backup HDD to one of the Thunderbolt 4 ports in the back of the Mini did not solve the problem. So, for me, directly connecting the backup hard drives to the Mini is not a solution. I could switch to Carbon Copy Cloner, but I really don't need its extensive functionality and it seems a shame to pay for a pretty expensive application to solve this problem. CCC is usually set to backup once a day and what I may do is steal that idea and apply it to TM for now. Instead of backing up every hour (not really necessary in my case) I think I will set it to back up "Everyday" and when I am usually on my computer. (I assume it sets the time of the day when it will backup to the time the user initiates the "Everyday" option.) This will hopefully mitigate the annoyance of manually using "Back up Now" because the problem only occurs when the Mini is locked. The good news is I have all the ports on my Mini back. Since there was no difference in performance between direct connection to the Mini and connecting my backup drives to my CalDigit Thunderbolt Element hub, I reconnected the two backup hard drives to the Element hub. Thanks so much for going along with me on this adventure and trying to help.

hello mr. luigi. my displays arrive shortly so i started to disassemble my computer and peripherals including the backup drive. i feel like i got very lucky. my usb passport drive is plugged into the usb port on my 2023 m2 mini. this is sad because i shouldn't have to be lucky to have a consistent and positive backup experience. i spent more than a minute or two getting set up to make my backup drive a network drive. i'm off the hook for the nonce. however, i verify the backup every day because i use the recovery feature at least once a week. i hope apple sees this discussion string and fixes the issue as soon as possible. good luck. i'll still be following this discussion.

Hi bruiselee 13! This looks very cool! Thank you for sharing. And I hope you enjoy your new monitors!!! If my guess at when TM schedules my daily backups is wrong, I will check this out. BTW, maybe it's just my computer, but the posts in this discussion thread are chronologically all over the place. Your December 30th post about "timemachineeditor" was put on page 2 of this 6 page discussion. The next post is from Nov. 3rd! Maybe I have some setting all janked up. But if not, something crazy is going on here. Perhaps the discussion about Time Machine has morphed into one about Time TRAVEL. 😂

Hi bruiselee 13, Another update to my situation. I mentioned not wanting to pay for a different backup solution even though TM has gone rogue. Then I remembered I bought a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner for a very specific purpose years ago. Turns out it was CCC version 5 and CCC offers a 50% discount to folks who bought that version when purchasing the most recent version (CCC 7). So I said, "What the ****" and bought CCC7 at a discount. It's now installed on my wife's new M4 Mac Mini and set to backup every hour. Hopefully, this will be the most sane solution to this crazy issue. I am still using one of my drives as a TM drive set to backup once a day. All are connected to my(her) CalDigit Thunderbolt Element Hub.

Regarding Time Machine HD issue. I have now 3 week the Apple Mac mini M4 and trouble with Time Machine. I have tested some ssd HD. Not really any chance, that the Time Machine is working longer without trouble.

My solution is to use a Standard HD like this e.g. Toshiba Canvio Basics 1 TB. This is a mechanical HD. And I have used a USB C to USB A adapter. Now the TimeMachine is working two weeks without any problems. Ok, the HD is not the fastest. Cheers, Thomas

Since the dating of this discussion is all over the place on my Mac, I will start off by saying I am posting this on Jan. 1st. I previously posted that I had a license for Carbon Copy Cloner 5. I stopped using CCC 5 a while ago as I didn't really need its extensive functionality. However, after all the hassles I have had with TM and my M4 Mac Mini I decided to revisit the CCC website. Happily found out yesterday that I qualified for a discount on the latest version of Carbon Copy Cloner 7 because I had paid for CCC 5. So I bought CCC 7 for a very reasonable price of about $30. I installed it on my Mac mini and set it to back up every hour on the hour. That was 24 backups ago and CCC 7 has worked flawlessly. IMO, the money spent is well worth not having the hassles of TM. Clearly, Bombich software, who makes Carbon Copy Cloner is putting more effort into their product than Apple is with TM. As an experiment, I kept my 2nd backup hardrive connected to TM but set it to back up every "hour + 1 minute on the hour + 1 minute." So 5:01, 6:01, etc. Because CCC 7 initiated a backup at 5:00, 6:00, etc. the TM backups scheduled for 1 minute later ARE ALL PROCEEDING nicely. No more failed backups. At least for one day. If things stay as they presently are, I will continue to dedicate one of my backup harddrives to CCC 7 and one to TM. If TM starts to get naughty again, I am going to abandon TM completely and use CCC 7 on both my backup harddrives. I hope my experience is of help to some of you. I remember when I got my 2018 Mac Mini, the "Unlock my Mac via Apple Watch" feature performed very poorly despite many folks having the same problem. To this day it continues to perform poorly. So I don't hold out any hope that Apple will fix TM with our Macs and refuse to be jerked around anymore by the problem. I consider the $30 spend on CCC a great investment in performance and sanity.

Update: My success backing up using Carbon Copy Cloner for one drive and TM for another with the TM backups set to proceed 1 minute after the CCC backups was short lived. The TM backups reverted to their old, "Can't complete the backup...blah, blah, blah" message a day later.

So, I have totally abandoned TM as a backup tool and now use Carbon Copy Cloner 7 for both of my backup drives and it performs perfectly. As I said in a previous message, I hold out no hope that Apple will solve this problem and consider the $30 spent to update my version of CCC well worth the money in terms of performance and peace of mind.

hi mr. luigi. i've read all of your postings, but i'm just going to respond to this one. ccc sounds like a good solution and i'm going to keep it in mind if/when my backups start failing again. as for this group's timeline? i see the same sort of page/response arrangement. it looks like they're using a scatter algorithm to "sort" the responses. finally, my two displays work great except another problem re-reared its head. (this was a problem that i believe was fixed and is once again broken.) when the displays wake up from being asleep, all the windows migrate to the primary display. so i have to drag them all back. i wrote a black screen saver and never allow my displays to sleep. sad. oh, i have six workspaces spread over the two displays. lots of fun.

Hi bruiselee, old friend!

Sorry to hear about your displays. I have two 4K displays in my setup and sometimes when I log-in the main display fails to "activate." I have to unplug its connector to my 2018 Mac Mini and plug it back in and that solves the problem. Other times the screens that were on one monitor reappear on the other monitor when I log in and the secondary display becomes the main display. This doesn't happen often, so I just live with it. But I thought I would mention it since you shared your own experience with your displays. CCC continues to perform like a dream. It is such a relief to not have to deal with TM backup problems anymore. Especially since the M4 Mac Mini that has the problem was a Christmas Present from me to my wife and I wanted her to have a fun and smooth experience with her new machine. The last thing I wanted was for her to have me constantly on HER Mini trying to solve the TM issue. As I read the posts here about the problems people continue to have with TM, it makes me wish I was infinitely wealthy so I could gift them a license to Carbon Copy Cloner so they could be done with the problem and enjoy their computers. Too bad CCC hasn't seen this discussion thread. If they had, I think it would be smart business for them to offer everyone a discount to CCC 7 using the coupon code, "TimeMachineWillDriveYouMad." 🤣🤣🤣 Cheers, Luigi

fortunately for me i didn't have to spend a lot of time getting a solution that worked for me. but it was a stressful day and a half. i needed that backup to work. now. you can't possibly know i'm old :-) my wife once gave me a garage door opener for christmas. it was for a house that should never have had an automatic opener and it took me all day to install it (it would close, but bounce back open). the upside? her father, a very accomplished handyman, came over to help. he said there's nothing for it except to hew out the beam to make room for the travel rod. i looked at it and said to myself, hey that's a right triangle. if i only knew the Pythagorean theorem, i could resolve this issue without a single hew. fortunately, i know that theorem and solved the problem in 5 minutes by lowering the control unit to make the travel rod the length it needed to be. i love telling that story. lee

Hi Lee! You can't possibly know I'm old too. But that made your Pythagorean Theorem story all the more pleasurable. I taught physics for 45 years and in that time Pythagoras and his insight into right triangles came in more handy than one would think in a world dominated by things very, very small and very, very large. I hope you gave yourself a heartfelt pat on the back for such a clever solution to the garage door caper. As for receiving a garage door opener from your wife for Christmas, it is my opinion that there is nothing that says "I love you" more than receiving such a gift. You are a very, VERY lucky man. Continued good fortune with Time Machine. Kind regards, Luigi

Well I’m very sad to share that the TM backup problem has returned once more. This is with a freshly rebuilt Mac and newly formatted backup drive.

I’ll be responding to my Apple Support ticket advising their ‘solution’ didn’t work.

At least it saves me from wiping my wife’s iMac which suffers the same issue.

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>

If this comment appears somewhere random in the discussion, it was posted on Feb. 5.

I am subscribed to a Reddit discussion on this same issue. One of the participants just posted that after updating to the latest version of MacOS, 15.3, his TM backups have proceeded without issues. Has MacOS 15.3 fixed the problem for anyone here?

I fed this detail back to Apple Support today:

Hi ......., thanks for coming back to me.......

The problem did indeed return even after completely erasing and rebuilding the Mac and using a reformatted external drive for TM backups.

While I've been rebuilding the Mac in stages I've been logging every single change with respect to apps being loaded and any changes made within MacOS itself.

At the point the issue returned I had added a widget to the desktop (from a third party app) and after completely uninstalling that app the problem has gone away. I'm continuing to monitor as in the old MacOS install I had thought the problem was resolved only for it to return a few days (or weeks) later.

I'll keep you updated as to how things proceed (within the 4 weeks ticket close period).

Trusting you are duly informed.

I'm hoping the 'widget' issue was what caused the issue for me, and it does make me wonder how many of you fellow suffers are using widgets, especially third party ones?