Hard Drive Replacement Broke Time Machine

[AcesHigh87]

This sounds a little weird but I don’t really have any other explanation.

My iMac hard drive was failing on SMART status so I decided to bring it into apple and have them replace my drive. They upgraded it to El Capitan (from Yosemity) while doing so. When I got my computer back I managed to restore from my time machine backup without any major issues (aside from USB 2 being super slow). However ever since I got it restored I haven’t been able to do anything with Time Machine. Setting a new backup to run sits on Preparing indefinitely and if I open time machine I can’t click back to any previous days.

Does anyone have any idea what might have done this or how I could potentially fix it?

 

[JohnDS]

You may have to set Time Machine to "inherit" the old backup: http://pondini.org/TM/B5.html

See also: http://pondini.org/TM/D1.html

and: http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html

 

[grahamperrin]

Preparing indefinitely

It sometimes makes you suspect that it will be endless when in fact, it will end. After an unexpectedly long time.

After the end, the first completion, subsequent runs should be OK.

If you like, use Disk Utility to verify (not attempt to repair) both your OS X startup volume and the Time Machine backup volume. The latter may take a long time.

 

[AcesHigh87]

I had it running last night but then my computer needed to restart for something. Now it's saying backup failed every time I try it immediately says backup failed.

I wonder if it's because I had to set my computer up as a new user and then merge over (long story). When I set the new user up I clicked not now on the "do you want to use time machine" thing and now I can't get it to come back to try the inherit thing.

My guess is that it's trying to do a full backup and not having space for it so it's failing but it shouldn't need to do a full backup.

As a note as well I can use Time Machine Now (I think it was a user problem) but I still can't get it to create any new ones.

 

[grahamperrin]

Console is your friend. Launch the app, consider messages at the time of the failure …

 

[AcesHigh87]

Console is your friend. Launch the app, consider messages at the time of the failure …

Oddly enough opening console seems to do the trick even though it shouldn't have done anything different haha. With co sole open it did a normal backup (nothing huge and no errors) without issue.

It did take a bit longer than usual (about 3 hours for 60gb) but it has been running normal ever since.