Something is locked and blocking my time machine backup

Had the exact same issue. No need to go in Terminal to resolve this issue. In System Settings, go to Privacy & Security and next in Full Disk Access. Add Time Machine and give it full access. Just did my first backup with no issue and no error message. Spent 1 hour on the phone with Apple and they didn't know this... Hope this helps!

Paste the following command into Terminal.app and hit Enter:

log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info --last 4h|grep "Operation not permitted"

Add the path to the TM exclusion list and the problem should be solved.

[Edited by Moderator]

While removing the widget will get rid of the TM error, it is suboptimal. The better solution is to add the offending directory to TM's exclusion list like so:

tmutil addexclusion ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems/Data/SystemData/com.apple.chrono/timelines/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems

Thanks for this. Giving Time Machine the Full Disk Access via System Settings has worked for me. (I did not try any Terminal commands.)

At the end of the article about Biome, Howard Oakley writes

deleting the contents of the Biome folder shouldn’t result in any data loss.

Try deleting the Biome folder like so:

rm -rf ~/Library/Biome/

and then manually start a TM backup and report the result.

jwhitt wrote:

I ran that and Apple will not allow me to post the result. Now what do I do? The result is long.

How do I "exclude that directory or file from the backup"

I found from Terminal that I was getting an error because of my Google Drive. It said, "Data/Users/xxx/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-xxx" (xxx = my name). So I excluded it using the Time Machine settings.

To do that you go into Time Machine settings and click on Options and then click the + to add what you want to exclude. Then you navigate to the item. In my case, I excluded the Google drive. Also my Dropbox drive and iCloud since all three of them are backed up on the cloud anyway. You have to exclude each item one at a time. I still have to test to see if that solves it. Will report back.

I have an M4 Mac Mini and I boot from an external NVME SSD. As "mcpeteSF" previously mentioned, the only thing that worked for me was actually unmounting the internal hard drive from the Mac Mini. Once unmounted, I was able to back up my hard drive with Time Machine without any problems.

I unmounted it using Disk Utility.

I hope this works for you!

Macos Sequoia 15.3.2

Please clarify the steps to take, if you can.

I open terminal and pasted the string, and this is what I cam up with:

Last login: Wed Nov 13 19:00:29 on console

The default interactive shell is now zsh.

To update your account to use zsh, please run `chsh -s /bin/zsh`.

For more details, please visit https://support.apple.com/kb/HT208050.

Peters-MBP-M2-Max:~ peter$ tmutil addexclusion ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems/Data/SystemData/com.apple.chrono/timelines/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems

/Users/peter/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems/Data/SystemData/com.apple.chrono/timelines/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems: Error (100002) while attempting to change exclusion setting.

Peters-MBP-M2-Max:~ peter$ 

Thanks in advance.

Peter

@Verdinegro Glad it workout for you! You can also unmount by right clicking the offending drive in the Finder and click on 'Eject "....."'

The error code (100002) indicates that the file cannot be found. This could be due to an error when copying and pasting the string, or it may be because the directory containing the file does not exist on your Mac, probably because you have never used the FindMyWidget application.

That is very possible - I don't even know what FindMyWidget does.

So this did not solve my

"Time Machine couldn’t complete the backup to “Data-2-8TB”

Time Machine did not finish backing up because some files were unavailable. Backups will resume when your Mac is unlocked." problem ...

Sigh!

Hello again and thank you for you very quick answers. I tried the other string, and this is what it says:

Peters-MBP-M2-Max:~ peter$ log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info --last 4h|grep "Operation not permitted"

2024-11-15 06:25:27.416560+0100 0x39fc91   Error       0x0                  289    0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:FileProtection] Failed to acquire device lock assertion for '/Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/Peters MBP-M2-Max/2024-11-15-055749/Macintosh HD - Data/Users/peter/Library/Biome/streams/restricted/ProactiveHarvesting.Mail/local/752462791393167' (assertion state: <dropped>), error: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=1 "Operation not permitted"

Peters-MBP-M2-Max:~ peter$ 

so there you have it, you found the offending directory. Now all you need to do is to add it to the TM exclusion list like so:

tmutil addexclusion ~/Library/Biome/streams/restricted/ProactiveHarvesting.Mail/local/752462791393167

See this article for an explanation about Biome.