2010 MacBook (white) backup VERY slow

[ducaticanine]

my 2010 Macbook (white version) is in desperate need to be backed up and reinstall the OS as this computer is very slow. I bought a 500GB external drive to begin the backup process thru Time Machine but for the last 15+ hours it is still reading 'indexing backup' and looks as though it is still working. any thoughts?

 

[logana]

Sounds as if the hard disk is dying. Hope you have not left it too late............

If a disk is flaky then just about the worst thing you can do is reinstall the operating system since you will be writing constantly to the disk for anything up to about an hour.

Kill the backup and buy an SSD install the OS to that and then hope that you can get your data off the old disk using a USB caddy.