Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Solution for Broken Time Machine Backups and a New Laptop on the Way

At work I use a late 2013 13" MacBook Pro with Retina display. Most of my files are kept in our corporate Box.com account, which is a handy way to ensure that they are backed up. However, I was using Time Machine to ensure application settings were also backed up, and in general for a "belt and suspenders" approach.

Unfortunately, Time Machine stopped functioning back in October. I kept running into this problem.

I tried all sorts of fixes, including disabling application throttling for it, to no avail.

I have a new 15" MacBook Pro on the way and want to be able to move all my old settings over to it, so I revisited the issue yesterday. After trying several of the fixes I found online, again with no positive results, I decided to upgrade from OS 10.11 El Capitan to 10.12 Sierra. That fixed it.

My laptop is bound to our NT domain and I found that after the upgrade my NT account was locked. It turns out that there was a known bug with Sierra causing this. Applying the OS 10.12.3 update fixed that. I also had to upgrade to the later versions of the Symantec VIP soft token app and the Pulse Secure VPN client. The older versions I had weren't compatible with Sierra.

Other than fixing my Time Machine backup and requiring a couple application updates, Sierra isn't dramatically different from El Capitan. I deleted the Siri icon from my dock -- I don't use it even on my iPhone.

Hopefully, I'll have the new MBP by the end of the week, but at the rate our IT department is working it may not be until next week.