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KC410 Author

Level 1

9 points

Time Machine drives "ejected" during backup

I have two Time Machine drives. One connected to the MacBook Pro 15 USB port. The other connected to an attached Cinema Display. Both drives started failing at backup about a month ago. The error is that the drive was ejected. The .inProgress file gets partially built, up to maybe 2GB.

Have restarted, safe booted, swapped ports, reformatted one drive.

They still claim to have been ejected, but the drives always remain mounted.

Has anyone discovered the cause of this? -Thanks

MacBook Pro Retina

Posted on Aug 7, 2020 7:51 AM

Top-ranking reply

KC410 Author

Level 1

9 points

Posted on Aug 10, 2020 12:59 PM

[Solved] Removed a large complex installer file (package).

Thanks for the article. I gave all of that a try, some of it twice. I did not know about holding the option key on the Time Machine menu. However, the "Verify Backups" was grayed out in this case.

I ran Disk First Aid on the internal SSD and one backup drive. Then started backup with only the one external drive attached. The backup still failed.

It looks like the backup problem was being caused by the Catalina updater (~8GB) in this case. Backups seemed to have stopped around the time I downloaded the it, so I trashed the package and attempted to empty the trash. After 20 minutes of emptying, I clicked the "x" to stop. It stopped right away. I chose "empty" again, and it emptied right away.

After that the backups started working.

Thanks again - kc

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Time Machine drives "ejected" during backup

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