Time Machine not functioning with High Sierra

I tried today to backup my Macbook Pro and when I connect the external hard drive i get an error every time I try to do a backup. The external harddrive is a WD My book 3 TB and i formated it to HFS file-format and the problem is because of the incompatibility with APFS. The Macbook is upgraded to the latest MacOs which is High Sierra Developer Beta 2. Has anyone encountered this problem?

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Are you running MacOS 10.13 beta 2 version (17A291j) or

MacOS 10.13 beta 2 update 1 version (17A291m)


I’ve been backing up to TimeMachine but I’m running 17A291j I haven’t installed 17A291m yet, and there is a note in the release notes saying not to use TimeMachine.

If you’re using 17A291m then don’t worry about TimeMachine, it’s intentionally disabled according to the release notes.

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Thank you, I have been following this thread and your reply has fully clarified the issue for me. I hope public beta 2 corrects this?

Sigh. Thanks for the reminder... I knew I should have read the Release Notes more closely..... Instead, figured it out the more tortuous way. BTW, I simply use Carbon Copy Cloner instead, and it works fine. I've also limited my fun with High Sierra to an older system that's absolutely not my primary one.

Confirmed. If you click "Options" on Time Machine settings, you'll notice your local disk is listed under the "Do not backup list" and you cannot remove it from that list. We'll have to free ball it until they sort out the data loss issues.

Beta 3 enables Time Machine once again.

Mine now says "Time Machine couldn't create a local snapshot to back up from because there was insufficient free space on the source volume(s)." I have 75GB free on a 500GB drive. Not sure how much it needs but I ddin't get this message before.

Time Machine still gives an error stating "Time Machine could not create a local snapshot to back up from"


Anyhow experience that?


Mid 2015 MB Pro Retina 2.8Ghz i7 using APFS file format

Is the time machine drive converted to APFS?

No, I've never seen a way to convert it to that. Is that a necessity to work now that my laptop is APFS?


*actually I've also tried using a 1TB USB SSD as Time Machine and get the same error. I did find that doing an option click on the disk drive in disk utility gives the option to convert to APFS. Tried that on the SSD and got an error saying "The operation couldn’t be completed. (com.apple.StorageKit error 118.)"


**Update #2 I used an older Mac to format the SSD with Disk Utility to make sure it did GUID partitioning (trying to create an APFS containter with Terminal stated it had to be GUID first) and that worked to format the drive. Brought the drive back to this machine and then it allowed me to convert to APFS. Went to Time Machine and chose to use that drive as the backup and then it said it couldn't be used because it was an incompatible format. It prompted to convert (format) so I let it do that which formatted it back as Mac OS Extended Journaled. Looks like now it just gets stuck on "Preparing backup"

Just to clarify... I came to this post too late. My time machine backups are very slow under High Sierra public beta 1 (as of 19 July 2017). Updating my Sierra backup after installing High Sierra was going to take all day. So I thought to myself 'I wonder if it will be faster if I update the backup disk to APFS?'


Whoops. It won't let me backup to an APFS disk. And as there's no way to convert an APFS disk back to HPFS without wiping the contents; I'm running High Sierra pants down with no backup.


🙂


I spent about 6 hours yesterday starting the backup, it did about 70GB of 195. Its restarting today, but is sloooow to start off with; 1.3MB in 30 mins. It will speed up as it goes along I think.


Note the backup disk is USB 2; but even so, Activity Monitor showed disk throughput to be in the 5MB/s range at it fastest...

I've tried :-

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0


And renicing the backup process, along with killing spotlight. Still slow.

I had the same problem with TM backups of the local disk. This has to do with whether you have opted to format the local drive to APFS during the OS install. If you reformatted to APFS, TM will not backup your local drive. If the local drive was formated as OS-Extended during the OS install, then TM will work fine

TimeMachine works fine if you have your drive running your MacOS formatted to APFS, your backup drive must be HFS though or TimeMachine won’t backup to it.


There was an issue with it in Beta 2 so Apple disabled backing up your drive with MacOS installed, but this was fixed with beta 3 so your backups should be working fine if you follow the correct steps, otherwise you might need to send a bug report.

Just updated to Beta 4 and my Time Machine backup still fails and says it can't create a local snapshot. Using APFS on my laptop and HFS on the external.

Any update on this?


What are the guidelines for Time Machine backups.


Unable to find any clarity online...

This is also happening to me! I have a 2TB Time Capsule and ever since upgrading the HS it never gets out of preparing backup.

I'm using 10.13.1 and this is still not fixed. Anybody knows a workaround? Or is Time Machine broken for good?