I don’t run Time Machine all the time. I only back up my computer once every few weeks. My last back-up was on Jan. 12. Since then, I upgraded my MacBook Pro to the Monterrey OS. Today, I tried to run my Time Machine back up and it tells meet could not complete the back up due to “/Users/christinekling/OneDrive/Writing/Scrivener/Scrivener Shipwreck series book files/Circle of Bones.scriv/Files/Data/5AECF4C0-AFC3-457D-A031-F99181C24EDC/content.jpg” could not be backed up." I have not opened that old book file in years. I can’t get the back up to go beyond that one so I don’t know if it will continue to have problems with other files.
Any reason on particular not backing up at shorter intervals? Are you happy to lose a “few weeks” of work–not just Scrivener–in case of disk crash or something?
It seems unlikely that the backup trouble has anything to do with your Scrivener project in particular. I would i) copy the Circle of Bones project to a flash drive for safekeeping, then ii) grab the Circle of Bones project again and move it to some other location on your harddrive – somewhere not in your OneDrive folder – and try the backup again.
I am reading in the news that OneDrive has been updated by MS and set to automatically remove all locally stored files in your OneDrive-synced folder. (Many, many people are unhappy about this.) Also, that folks are having OD cloud access lag problems also. At a running guess, this is going to be the source of your trouble. If you did not previously have OD’s on-demand setting turned on and want to turn it off, there is no longer a way to do so in preferences, though it seems you may be able to get the result via contextual menu on the OneDrive folder itself. Disclaimer: I do not use OneDrive, so you might want to google up some authoritative discussion on this burning issue.
I save all my Scrivener files to the One Drive cloud, so I don’t worry about losing a few weeks of work. I pay for a family subscription to Microsoft 365 (I need Word and Excel, husband needs Outlook) that comes with one TB of One Drive storage per person. I can’t see paying for iCloud storage on top of that. The Time Machine back up is more to rebuild a new computer or drive in the event of a crash. Also, we live on a boat and we do go off-grid for weeks at a time, in which case, I run Time Machine all the time.
As @gr mentioned, your TimeMachine issue might be (probably?) is related to Microsoft’s recent change to One Drive.
I don’t view cloud storage as a backup of any sort, really. Should your files or machine get corrupted then that corruption is synced to the cloud storage service. Poof. Your backup you thought you have is gone. Just saying.
I don’t see how that’s relevant here. No need to explain though. So you are aware, Apple’s iCloud also has its own issues which they now say are fixed, but I’m not sure.
gr- Thanks so much for this eye-opening update. I will follow your first suggestion for the short term, but given this news about the Mac version of One Drive (which I had not heard), I’m going to have to seriously reconsider my work flow. Oddly enough, I have both a laptop and an iMac, and they have not responded the same. I did not have my files removed on the MacBook, but they were removed on the iMac when I updated it about two weeks later. I’ve not been working on the desktop Bec cause it was too cold in that room, and as the files were not removed on my laptop, I hadn’t noticed this new kerfuffle from Microsoft. Thanks for the heads up.
First off, I use Carbon Copy Cloner doing updates on my second computer, so I have a daily backlog of captures of my hard drive on that machine. We’re on the boat in Turkey, and when my last MBP died from a water spill, I couldn’t buy a new one here with an English keyboard. So I bought a cheap iMac with an HDD and switched out the keyboard that came with it. I pulled the 750 GB SSD out of the old MBP, put it in an enclosure and I use it to boot from and use the internal drive as the back up. Weird set up but it works better than the glacially slow original iMac.
And as I said, I live on a boat. I have a bigger worry about the computers and hard drives on board being destroyed by weather, fire, or the boat sinking. I always want to have some kind of backup that is off the boat. At the moment, I’m rethinking Microsoft.