macOS 10.15.3 Time Machine Problems
In yesterday’s article, I described how I discovered that two of my Time Machine snapshots had apparently got stuck, and couldn’t be deleted when automatic backups tried to ‘thin’ those snapshots. That in turn was filling my log with error messages every time that Time Machine made an automatic backup. This article explains what happened, and how I fixed the problem.
If you’re intending to rely on Time Machine backups in macOS 10.15.3, you might want to use an alternative as well. I can now confirm that making the first full backup using Time Machine can take so long that it may not be feasible, and that some users are also experiencing failure to restore from an existing backup.
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If you are intending to make a full first backup using Time Machine in 10.15.3, you should be wary of its potential to never complete, and be prepared to fall back to a substitute backup system. If you do encounter very slow progress during the first backup, cancel it, remove the incomplete backup, add the .DocumentRevisions-V100 folder at the root of each volume to be backed up to Time Machine’s exclude list (press Command-Shift-. to see hidden items in the file selector dialog), then try again.
Previously:
Update (2020-02-17): Howard Oakley:
This article explains how you might determine if this is the cause of your Mac backing up slowly, and if it is, what you might do about it.
