macOS Tahoe - Time Machine not working after clean install or update (accents in drive name cause the issue)

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a strange issue I ran into after updating to macOS Tahoe 26.1, in case it helps someone else.

Here’s what happened:

After performing a clean install of macOS Tahoe, I reached the stage where the system asks if you want to restore from a Time Machine backup. I connected my external drive, selected the backup, and it just stayed stuck on “Initializing…” forever. It never progressed.

At first, I thought it was an issue with the backup itself, so I decided to skip the migration and finish setting up the Mac. But when I later tried to create a new Time Machine backup from scratch, it also failed — it wouldn’t even start backing up.

After quite a bit of troubleshooting, I discovered the real cause:

If the external drive’s name contains special characters like accents, cedillas, or other non-English letters (e.g. é, ç, ã, õ, etc.), Time Machine completely breaks under macOS Tahoe 26.1.

Once I renamed the drive to a plain name without any special characters (only basic Latin letters and numbers), everything started working perfectly again.

Hopefully this helps others running into the same issue, and maybe Apple can fix it in a future macOS Tahoe update.