Time Machine Taking FOREVER

[Iglio]

ok so i am wondering why on earth my time machine is taking forever to back up, its not even a lot of things to transfer? Thoughts?

[walnuts]

Is it stuck on "preparing"? It may just need to take a long time to finish one backup, and then it will be better. I had the issue with mine. If you look in the system log in the console app, you'll see that it needs to do a "deep traversal" of some node. Once it finishes, backups will be more normal.

See this (http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=534441&highlight=time+machine+stuck+preparing) thread.

[alphaod]

Well Time Machine uses your Spotlight index to backup stuff so it has to finish the indexing first and then do a verification to see everything is in order. During backup if you're using a slow drive or connection it will also contribute to the slowdown.