Time Machine Fails on High Sierra

[milmber]

I seem to have a problem with Time Machine fails silently on High Sierra.

This was working in Sierra without any problems but fails consistently on High Sierra.

I have tried the following with no success

1. Deleting my time machine preferences (/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist)
2. Deleting all my backups and attempting to backup to a different USB disk, internal disk or Time Capsule Disk

I note the following in the logs when Time Machine fails.

Sep 30 16:06:17 Hackintosh backupd[2790]: [2790] stack overflow

The actual backupd crash report doesn't seem to shed any light on what is going wrong...

Process:               backupd [3515]
Path:                  /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd
Identifier:            backupd
Responsible:           backupd [3515]
6   backupd                           0x00000001000a299f 0x100091000 + 72095
12  backupd                           0x00000001000ada7a 0x100091000 + 117370
13  backupd                           0x00000001000acb43 0x100091000 + 113475
14  backupd                           0x00000001000a5c81 0x100091000 + 85121
15  backupd                           0x00000001000a38cf 0x100091000 + 75983
16  backupd                           0x000000010009cb96 0x100091000 + 48022
17  backupd                           0x0000000100097efd 0x100091000 + 28413
18  backupd                           0x0000000100097949 0x100091000 + 26953
       0x100091000 -        0x10011dff3  backupd (283) <777103BB-4B5F-3144-BABD-9D1A61758CC0> /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd

Is any one else facing a similar problem?

 

[Comcody]

Same here, went back to 10.12.6.

 

[milmber]

Same here, went back to 10.12.6.

I managed to fix this in the end. Not 100% sure what the problem was however the following combination worked for me.

1. Target a new backup drive
2. Go to System Preferences->Spotlight->Privacy and add your local disk (e.g. Macintosh HD) to the list of areas that Spotlight should be prevented from searching
3. Close System Preferences
4. Go back to System Preferences->Spotlight->Privacy and remove your local disk.
5. Give the "mds" processes a while to re-create the Spotlight index (you should be able to see it in the Activity Monitor)
6. Go to Time Machine and Options and reduce the backup size by excluding Folders (e.g. "System", "Library", "Music" folders)
7. The first backup should now run correctly. Once it shows up as being successful you should be able to go back to Options and remove the exclusions so that the rest of your folders are backed up.

There does seem to be some people on the apple developer forums complaining that Time Machine was not working in the High Sierra Beta's and there also seems to be people with a similar issue on the apple discussion forums - so probably related to all types of machines running MacOS.