Open Ulbow and ensure that you’ve enabled (ticked) the Limit entries shown item in its View menu.
Once the backup slows down to a crawl, give it a few minutes longer, then cancel it.
If you don’t have one, you should know now just how to reproduce it. To do this, you’ll need to know of a recent attempt to make a backup which ran into problems, and is still in your log. The best way to see this is using the latest version of my free log browser Ulbow, with its chart feature. The only course of action is to cancel the backup in the Time Machine pane, turn off automatic backups, trash the partial backup, and use a third party product such as Carbon Copy Cloner, which of course clones everything without trouble or error. The backup just grinds to a near-halt all of a sudden. Inspect the log using Console (if you must) and there aren’t any telltale error messages being thrown into the log. There are no errors reported, and T2M2 simply shows that the backup is still in progress. When I write almost, I mean that it slows to the point where completion would then take days, or possibly even weeks. So there’s no excuse over speed or free space on the backup volume.Įvery time that I try to do this, the backup runs very briskly until exactly 215.90 GB have been backed up, then almost stops. My first backup is large, over 1.2 TB, and is being made in 10.15.3 to an empty 6 TB SSD which is connected by Thunderbolt 3 (details follow tomorrow).
It’s completely reproducible: I’ve tried starting this from scratch on at least six occasions, using various changes, and it happens every time, and at exactly the same point during the attempt to back up. In my case, it affects the first full automatic or manual backup being made to a new backup folder. As I’ll explain in more detail here tomorrow, I’ve just been struck down by this problem, so this article details how to diagnose it. One of the commonest serious problems with Time Machine, particularly in macOS 10.15 Catalina, is that backups, particularly the first full backup, never complete, or take days to do so.