Time machine just keeps saying "preparing back up"

[someone28624]

I'm trying to do a back up in Time Machine. It's been going for like an hour and it still says "Preparing Backup."

I haven't changed my files around much and it really should only have a couple of kb worth of new data to back up.

My last successful backup was yesterday. It's done this a few times since then. I tried to stop the back up and restart it to no avail.

I also went into my backups folder and deleted the "in progress" backup then tried to backup again and it's still not working.

Ideas?

 

[joelovesapple]

I have the same problem too and it is worrying me a bit. Could someone please help us on this?

Thanks 🙂

 

[mattyb240]

While i'm not sure this will work i'll just offer my suggestions:

Eject the drive and plug it back in.
Or repair permissions,
Or do a restart (just like the ol'windows days)

Hope it helps

 

[jzuena]

While i'm not sure this will work i'll just offer my suggestions:

Eject the drive and plug it back in.
Or repair permissions,
Or do a restart (just like the ol'windows days)

Hope it helps

I used to just reboot when that happened on my Mini (but I'm not a patient person). Eventually I realized that my Time Machine drive was low-level formatted using MBR. I re-partitioned it in Disk Utility and selected GUID for the low-level format and then Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Since then I haven't seen the endless waiting. I do occasionally get a failure to run a backup. The OP might want to verify the low level format of their drive. The only way I've seen to do this in Disk Utility is while partitioning the drive.

 

[steveca]

happens to me sometimes as well and I just switch it off, leave for a couple of minutes and then back on... works great. Strange that if I switch it on immediately or after a couple of seconds it doesnt work... have no idea why to be honest...

 

[steeler]

I had this problem about a month ago. I tried everything... even wiped out the Time Machine partition, and re-partitioned/formatted.

Nothing seemed to work. However, I did discover that Spotlight was indexing the Time Machine drive, so I excluded that drive and the backup worked fine.
I may have restarted after re-configuring Spotlight.

Good Luck!