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btsvchris

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 18, 2014
93
12
Hello everyone,
My 320 GB external hard drive which I use for pictures (around 30 GB) and the Time Machine backup (around 280 GB) is running out of space now.
So I bought a larger one and followed Apples instruction on how to put the old backups of the iMac on the new external hard drive.
Now it is preparing the copy for almost three hours now.
It says Copy of 522.481 Objects is preparing. The number is increasing. There is no time when it will be finished.

I guess the transfer will take around 4 hours with USB 2.0, but how long will the preparation still need?
Thanks for any help
 

h9826790

macrumors P6
Apr 3, 2014
16,611
8,537
Hong Kong
If you are using HDD but not SSD, and there are millions of small files in your HDD (e.g. Photos), that may takes really a long time to finish this "first" backup. Don't worry about it. Let it do it's job in the background and keep using your Mac if you want to. As long as the backup still there, nothing can go wrong.
 
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