After upgrading from Mac OS Mojave directly to Big Sur, skipping the Mac OS Catalina release, some of our clients experienced the issue, that Time Machine would not back up anymore. Some clients had their Macs backup to an Apple Time Capsule, others to NAS drives such as from Synology or QNAP. They all had the same error message in common. Time Machine aborts stating:
Time Machine snapshot could not be created for the disk “%@”
or
Time Machine could not back up the disk “%@” because a snapshot of the disk could not be created.
While this is not a very helpful error message to start with, there is fortunately a pretty easy fix.
On our clients’ Mac’s we ran the following two commands to get Time Machine backing up again:
Open Terminal on your mac and simply copy & paste these two commands.
Both commands need to be run with sudo permission. You will be asked for your password, which you use to log into your Mac on startup.
First, we need to clean all local Time Machine backup history, which is stored in a hidden directory
sudo rm -r /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots
The last steps removes the local snapshots:
sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /
Once that is completed, kick off a new Time Machine backup and you should see a new backup soon.
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