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Time Machine Backup taking forever...stuck on 'Preparing Backup'

S

Synergie

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 15, 2011
771
210
Halifax, Canada
Since I have upgraded to Lion I have noticed my Time Machine Backup is taking forever... like it's stuck on 'Preparing Backup'. Console in the system.log says that a Deep Scan is required due to subdirectories...

I've let it run now for over half an hour and it's still on Preparing Backup. This is the third time I have tried to do it. The other two times I had to shut my MBP because I had to leave (and take the laptop with me).

Does it usually take this long to prepare a backup when it needs to deep scan? (I don't have a HUGE amount of stuff on my HD...It's a 320 GB with roughly 250 GB free.

How long should I let it run for? The laptop is getting a tad warm in the process.
 
S

Synergie

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 15, 2011
771
210
Halifax, Canada
HellDiverUK said:
My first backup after upgrade took around 6 hours. I left it running overnight.

I'm only using 31GB of drive space on my machine.
Click to expand...

Well, mine was not progressing at all.... the backup got corrupted.... so I ended up having to delete the entire backup history :( (and along with it any chance of downgrading back to SL, mind you I'm mostly happy with Lion anyway) And I have started a brand new initial backup. It worked right away... it went from 'Preparing Backup' to 'Calculating Space' fairly quickly so I knew it was working this time. However, the estimate on how long to backup: roughly 5 days!!!! for only 75 GB of data! WOW! Glad I don't have more on here!

I couldn't remember how long my initial took before... but I don't remember it taking THAT long! My question is, is it ok for me to be using my MBP during the backing up process? And not that I intend to stop it mid-backup, but what happens if I lose connection briefly or have to shut the MBP down etc during the process? Will it append once it starts again or will it start all over??
 
dcorban

dcorban

macrumors 6502a
Oct 29, 2007
914
30
Using 11b wireless?

I just did a full TM backup last night with an external PATA USB drive. It took just under two hours for 120GB.
 
C

cas85

macrumors regular
May 4, 2010
121
7
I just ran into the same problem as in the OP. I just deleted my Time Machine partition on my external and tried again and it worked immediately. I'm not really concerned about missing my SL backup as I didn't have much on there anyway. If I need to revert, I still have the SL install disc.
 
Fraaaa

Fraaaa

macrumors 65816
Mar 22, 2010
1,081
0
London, UK
I got a Time Capsule recently, and I regret a bit. I backed up 80GB in a day(on WiFi) when I first turned on. I still don't know if the local transfer affect my home connection usage or not. Also my TC is not my router. Anyone knows?
 
S

Synergie

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 15, 2011
771
210
Halifax, Canada
Yes I am doing the backup over WiFi... I don't have a spare ethernet or firewire cable right now to hook up directly.

And the good news is the estimate has dropped down to 4 days in only a couple of hours, so as it progresses, it seems to be recalculating how much time is left for the backup and it seems to be dropping, so I hope that means it won't take nearly as long as it first predicted!!!

At least it's backing up!!! More than I can say for the previous SL running backup... something had to have corrupted it when it first tried to backup after the Lion upgrade.

Oh well.... I also have the SL disk too if need be (somewhere) but like I said I am mostly happy with Lion anyway. Only a few annoyances that I am finding workarounds for. And those aren't really stability / bug issues... just me being picky in how I used to organize stuff.
 
C

cas85

macrumors regular
May 4, 2010
121
7
my first backup is 31GB and it's about done. It took about 35 mins using USB.
 
S

Synergie

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 15, 2011
771
210
Halifax, Canada
Ok, I figured out my issue. When the estimate went up to 6 days I got fed up... cancelled it again. I then deleted the file it had started on my time capsule again in order to start from scratch again. I then rebooted my Time Capsule after turning off the guest network (after noticing I had 14 of my closest neighbours on my guest network!!!!! Seriously, I had a couple of PS3's, a blackberry, an iPad, a couple iPhones, and the rest computers!) I also rebooted my laptop just to be sure.

The entire backup took 2 hours total.... as an initial backup!!!!!

Moral of the story... if you are going to do an initial backup to your Time Capsule over WiFi, make sure you don't have 14 people hogging your bandwidth first!!!

Now it works great! I have my initial and its been updating the backups just fine since! So the slowness was not Lion.... but the initial corruption of my old long standing backup was. It was working fine before I upgraded :(

As a side note... anyone know where I can get the wallpaper they are using in the new Time Machine? The blue / pink starry background? I'd like to have it to use as wallpaper!
 
Last edited:
F

fearofpop

macrumors newbie
Jan 27, 2013
1
0
Fraaaa

Fraaaa said:
I got a Time Capsule recently, and I regret a bit. I backed up 80GB in a day(on WiFi) when I first turned on. I still don't know if the local transfer affect my home connection usage or not. Also my TC is not my router. Anyone knows?
Click to expand...

You probably figured this out by now, but it shouldn't affect your home's usage. Internal traffic still uses the Ethernet and WiFi link and protocols (ie TCP/IP), but it is just a means of communicating, and not taking resources from the outside world (ie your internet service provider). You're only supposed to pay for communications between the eternal routers/switches and your home :)
 
K

katewes

macrumors 6502
Jun 7, 2007
465
146
Are people out there still having problems with Time Machine and Lion 10.7.5? When .5 came out, I read articles about this problem

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_...achine-running-slow-after-os-x-10.7.5-update/

hence, I stayed at .5, however, recently Skydrive doesn't install on my Mac. The problem is it claims my drive is case-sensitive format, when it is not. Anyway, Microsoft claims the problem can be solved by upgrading to .5

But I hesitated to go to .5 because of the Time Machine error.

Any comments?
 
ChrisTX

ChrisTX

macrumors 68030
Dec 30, 2009
2,690
54
Texas
K

katewes

macrumors 6502
Jun 7, 2007
465
146
ChrisTX said:
I saw this supplemental update, but I'm on 10.8.3 I'm still having insanely slow back ups. Any idea if this would work, or if there's a fix?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure of this, but did your Time Machine backup file initially start off as a Lion TM-backup, which you then upgraded to Mountain Lion-TM backup? If so, that could be a source of a problem.

If you have an extra external drive, you might try creating a fresh backup solely created under Mountain Lion.

I have no idea if that'll solve your problem, but it's worth a try.
 
ChrisTX

ChrisTX

macrumors 68030
Dec 30, 2009
2,690
54
Texas
katewes said:
I'm not sure of this, but did your Time Machine backup file initially start off as a Lion TM-backup, which you then upgraded to Mountain Lion-TM backup? If so, that could be a source of a problem.

If you have an extra external drive, you might try creating a fresh backup solely created under Mountain Lion.

I have no idea if that'll solve your problem, but it's worth a try.
Click to expand...

When I upgraded to mountain lion is when I started having the problem. And I will try creating a new backup under ML, and see what happens. Thanks!
 
S

stevemiller

macrumors 68000
Oct 27, 2008
1,983
1,492
Seriously apple. Get your **** together.

Trying to update my folks' system to mountain lion. I just wanted to run a time machine backup first, and its crawling along at kilobytes per second. Did the 10.7.5 with supplemental update. No improvement.

Even if there is some 10 step procedure involving terminal commands and multiple reboots that might help, I'm already fed up. I migrated from windows, eight years ago because I was sick of spending hours troubleshooting problems all the time. And somehow OSX feels like its regressing back to that kind of nonsense. I already had to deal with another issue for my parents where every time you turned on their iMac, the entire network would go down for all connected devices. Eventually isolated the problem to icloud doing... Something. Long story short, turn off icloud, everything goes back to normal. I guess they can't use icloud.

Sigh.
 
B

Bravo2zero

macrumors regular
Jun 1, 2013
125
42
Sheffield
i remember when i got my Iomega max mini 320gb time machine it took hours and hours.

when i upgraded the mac to SSD , 2Ghtz C2D and a 1tb max mini with a SATA HDD inside and transferred via Firewire , it took about 20mins for 17gb (fresh install of lion).
 
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