Why does time machine says preparing

Thank you for this article! When I went to back it up and time machine got stuck in Preparing I was worried about the worst. I followed your instructions and I was able to get it to completely run a backup. Thanks again.

I thought Preparing was taking a long time until I opened Preferences where it indicated it was Cleaning up old backups… so I wait a little longer and it backed up just fine.

It may have been slow to Prepare because I reinstalled Forgot to mention reinstall took aobut 2 hours the rest another 2 hours. Plan to have down time to do this. I had a different problem. Using USB3. Got a new backup done by restarting external, reattaching to USB2. Strange thing was, the drive was connected and mounted and selected in Time Machine.

Any guesses?? Nevermind…solved it. In the latest Yosemite, these instructions no longer seem valid. Double click on the folder, and you will get the list of devices you are backing up, including yours. As far as I can see, in Yosemite this does nothing relevant to time machine. Now, having done that — I still seem to be no further advanced.

I tried all of these procedures on my Leopard Nothing has worked. I am now getting cycling between Preparing…, Finishing… for several hours. Indexing took over 3 hours. Last backup was 2 weeks ago. Backup disk image shows on my Desktop and backup Time Capsule Data file shows in finder window. I wanted to run a backup before messing with the disk it had never been backed up before.

After more than 12hrs it was stuck on the indexing problem. Re above comment. Just noticed that all other items are folders. The in. Last back up was 19 March Anyway, followed your instructions but the deleting of. Items to delete shown as 0.

Any ideas how to progress? Thanks for original post. But I cannot see anything like you describe. Instead of the Backups. I also have a folder called bands and nothing else. Worst OS X upgrade ever. Terrible Wifi connectivity. But I then opened terminal and ran. I imagine this is equivalent to a deep traversal, even though the logs do not mention that one was required. So the only thing here will be to sit it out — stopping the backup presumably just means the partial traversal will be discarded before a backup is completed and the state saved for the next iteration….

I deleted the. I was hopping it will start backing up before I have to go on mandatory Social Security retirement. What could I be doing wrong? Other people were successful getting TM to work using the outlined steps. My external TM still has Would appreciate any help I can get. I had same problem with preparing backup getting stuck, i deleted inprogress back up and restarted. I started new back up now saying 16 hours remaining?

Why is this. Your previous backups maybe completely deleted. It will have to backup the entire mac again, which will take a long time 16 hours is reasonable. How do I make the Spotlight run? Do I need to start anopther program or what? Can you please explain this bit — what should I exactly do? The Spotify magnifying glass in the top right. It just needs to finish indexing the drive.

I would suggest checking console and filtering for backupd before going through this process. That is not completely accurate. That just displays File-system usage for backupd. I would suggest using console to be certain. Why even bother with mdworker on the backup disk? This is a BAD idea. It has to keep an index in order to keep track of what has been backed up.

Time Machine allows you to search within the backups, using the search field in the toolbar. If you disable mdworker, this sometimes very useful feature is not available.

You cannot add it to the privacy list. How about a further article telling us how to fix the issue if TimeMachine resides on a network drive! Thanks for the useful post! Actually doing it as I write this.

This is awesome. Thanks for posting! Just did this nothing happened. MAlwarebytes was actively running in background. Disabled it and now the backup has kicked in!.

Name required. Mail will not be published required. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without explicit permission is prohibited. Enjoy this tip? Subscribe to our newsletter! You have successfully joined our subscriber list. Dan says:. February 26, at pm. Janus says:. December 17, at am. Mark G says:. January 25, at am. Sharon says:. December 30, at am.

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However, many people said their Time Machine was stuck on the preparing backup stage. Some even said their Time Machine won't backup during the first backup. The Time Machine backup process could take longer than usual sometimes due to certain reasons. You should follow this guide to decide whether the Time Machine backup is really stuck or just running slow.

Click to tweet. Please try the following methods when your Time Machine backup failed: Time Machine preparing backup all the time. Believe it or not, we can make it easy to recover deleted data on Mac even if you are totally a novice.

The Spotlight may interrupt a Time Machine preparing process if it's indexing the drive used for Time Machine backup. So you need to stop the index manually. The extremely large and frequently used files could slow down your backup impressively, so you should exclude them from the backup.

Virus attack and disk failure are two other possible causes to lead to Time Machine preparing backup. Both could result in a serious data loss situation. So you should start to back or recover files at least the important ones from your Mac. Tom Nelson is an engineer, programmer, network manager, and computer network and systems designer who has written for Other World Computing,and others. Tom is also president of Coyote Moon, Inc. Time Machine has many tricks up its sleeve to ensure error-free backups , as well as backups that take as little time as possible to complete.

In some cases, these two goals can force Time Machine to take a long time preparing for a backup to begin. Time Machine uses an inventory system that OS X creates as part of the file system. In essence, any file that has been changed in any way is logged. Time Machine can compare this log of file changes against its own inventory of files.

In fact, it's so quick that most Time Machine users never notice it, except for the very first Time Machine backup, where the preparation phase does indeed take a long time. If you see a very long preparation phase, or Time Machine seems to be stuck in the preparation process, this guide should help you fix the problem. Check to see if the preparation process is stuck:. Open the Time Machine preference pane by clicking its icon in the System area of the System Preferences window.

The number of items in the message should be increasing, even if it does so slowly. If the number of items remains the same for more than 30 minutes or so, then Time Machine is probably stuck. If the number increases, or the message changes, then Time Machine is working correctly.

If the number of items increases, be patient and don't interrupt the preparation phase. If you think Time Machine is stuck, give it another 30 minutes, just to be sure. You can also just click the Off side of the switch. Now, in macOS Mojave, there is only a checkbox to turn off automatic backups. It's unclear whether this does the same as toggling Time Machine to Off. Still, the following may be useful in tracking down your issue.

Once Time Machine is turned off, check the following as possible causes of the problem:. If you use any type of antivirus or malware protection system , make sure the application is set to exclude the Time Machine backup volume. Some antivirus apps won't allow you to exclude a disk volume; if that's the case, you should be able to exclude the "Backups.

Spotlight can interfere with the Time Machine preparation process if it's performing an index of the Time Machine backup volume. You can prevent Spotlight from indexing the Time Machine backup volume by adding it to the Privacy tab of the Spotlight preference pane as follows:. Open the Spotlight preference pane by clicking its icon in the Personal area of the System Preferences window.