Time Machine stuck on "preparing backup." Any advice?

[mossme89]

My Mac doesn't backup to Time Machine anymore. It's stuck on "Preparing Backup." Believe me, it's not an issue of time. I left it on overnight and it was still "Preparing" in the morning. I'm thinking there's some issue with recent backups. Any advice?

I was thinking of deleting the past couple backups, would that help?

 

[prisstratton]

I have ran into this a few times in the last year. It got stuck on either “preparing” or “finishing” backup. I tried all of the suggestions you might want to find on the Internet. A couple of times I was able to resolve things by going into the backup and looking for an “in progress” file and deleting it. You can find full details at the following site:

http://pondini.org/UOjdZ/TM/Works.html

At the moment I cannot get to this site for whatever reason, but if you can, there is a lot of helpful information available.

In the end, I was not able to resolve my problems and I ended up deleting the existing backup and starting things from fresh. I was not happy about doing this, but all the information was still on my MBP, so I did not lose anything.

I have been troubled by this failure of Time Machine as I have had to “start from fresh” three times this year. At the moment I am actively looking for an alternative backup solution as TM is just not something I can fully trust anymore.

 

[komatsu]

As Priss has noted, this is a horrible problem to solve. In a lot of cases, when I hit this problem, I ended up using Carbon Copy Cloner.

I was thinking of deleting the past couple backups, would that help?

This is certainly worth a try.

 

[Fishrrman]

One more vote for trying CarbonCopyCloner instead!

 

[vworks]

Some mess with permissions?
Any files from time machine removed manually by any chance?