Time Machine Backup Issue Now Resolved in 9.5.3! [Updated]

That's good news indeed!

Is there any way to force the update earlier than wherever we may stand in the staggered upgrade sequence? I've tried a manual "Update Now" but that doesn't work.

@ZRL1

Unfortunately there is not. Sorry about the wait.

Regards,

Bob

FWIW, while I'm still at 9.5.2, I've been noticing over the past week or so that while the manual TM backup gets off to a really slow start (automatic TM is turned off so I always pick the time to do one and then periodically glance at the progress which is shown in the Preferences>TM window) what initially is expected to take an hour or more will suddenly complete in a matter of minutes). Was anything tweaked in the smaller updates in advance of 9.5.3?

Apple support forums also indicate the update to 9.5.3 would resolve the "Preparing Backup....." stagnant state of Time Machine to a NAS backup in mac OS Sierra.

I updated to 9.5.3 today and re-enabled On-Access scanner. Unfortunately my Time Machine backup is back to "Preparing backup...." and is stagnate in that state indefinitely.

Once I disabled the On-access scanner, I was able to successfully perform a time machine backup.  

macOS Sierra 10.12.1.

Early-2015 MacBook Pro 13" Retina

500 GB SSD 16GB RAM

Sophos Anti-Virus Home Edition 9.5.3

FWIW, Sophos updated to 9.5.3 when I wasn't looking. I did not test it directly but figured rebooting first would be a good idea.

After rebooting, I manually started my daily backup. It took a couple of minutes to determine a bit over 3GB need backup and projected about three hours would be necessary but watching the actual data count being backed up, the speed picked up and the backup was complete in less than 5 minutes. CPU usage was never very high.

So it looks like 9.5.3 is a significant improvement, at least in Yosemite.

Thanks for the feedback. I had no issues with Time Machine NAS backups prior to macOS Sierra; I had one mac running Mavericks and another running El Capitan. Both have Sophos AV Home version.  Neither had the "Preparing backup....." issues prior to upgrading to macOS Sierra. Once I upgraded both machines to macOS Sierra, that's when I started experiencing problems.  It appears to be an issue of how sophos works specifically with macOS Sierra. For now, I've disabled On-access scanning and everything works fine.

I am running Sophos Anti Virus on Mac running El Capitan. As reported earlier along with all others my Time Machine backups have been running very slow.

Sophos has just upgraded to v 9.5.3. I have to report: 

• No material improvement in speed of Time Machine backups;
• If I switch off Sophos on-access scanning there is a huge improvement in the speed of Time Machine backups.

I have been waiting patiently for v 9.5.3 under the assurances from Sophos that this problem would be fixed (a problem that did not exist prior to v 9.5.2). This outcome is EXTREMELY disappointing!!

We need assurances (and a time frame) from Sophos that this problem will be fixed. Absent this I (and I am sure others) will need to uninstall Sophos and look elsewhere for an anti-virus solution for my Mac.

PS: I presume that on-access problems are at the source rather than the destination of the Time Machine backup. Hence excluding the destination from Sophos on-access scanning does not help the Time Machine backup problem???

I have updated my macbook pro osz sierra to the new 9.5.3 and the problem still exists where time machine backups are not being performed. It merely hangs at preparing backup for hours.

The issue has not been resolved.

Same here. After updating to 9.5.3. and rebooting the system backup is still not possible as long as Sophos is running. The console shows the same problem as before:

kernel 2016-10-26 17:39:32.189896 +0200 AFP_VFS afpfs_vnop_ioctl:  afpfs_FindForkRef failed -1

Peter