Time Machine taking an hour to prepare?

[Savagestorm]

Okay so time machine has worked perfectly for me for months, and the, out of the blue it just starts taking almost an hour to prepare back-up. If I leave it long enough, it will back-uo, but it's not working as it should. Any suggestions?

Thanks

 

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_0_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5C1 Safari/525.20)

If you are using a time capsule then I would reboot the time capsule and the computer. If you haves FireWire or USB drive that it is backing up to, I would power cycle that drive. If hat doesn't work, I'd call tech support. Hope this helps.

 

[Savagestorm]

Power Cycle?

 

[gnasher729]

Okay so time machine has worked perfectly for me for months, and the, out of the blue it just starts taking almost an hour to prepare back-up. If I leave it long enough, it will back-uo, but it's not working as it should. Any suggestions?

Suggestion: Leave it long enough

Seriously, it can take long for example after installing XCode (which will copy tens of thousands of files), and on the other hand it takes long if your time machine runs out of space and deletes backups, and one of those backups had a huge number of files changed.

To see if everything is working Ok: Open Activity Monitor while the backup is running, check disk activity, and there should be hundreds of read/write operations per second (if Time Machine is handling tons of little files) or several Megabyte of read/write operations per second (if Time Machine is handling huge files). If your Macintosh is unresponsive during the backup then it is possible that either the hard drive you are backing up or the hard drive you are copying to has problems.

 

[soctechnologist]

I had this problem with Time Machine too and so have others (several threads around here). Check out post #17 in this thread, it fixed it for me.

 

[dragonmantek]

it pretty much depends on what you did before the last backup. mine's taken hours and hours sometimes.

 

[Savagestorm]

Thanks for the suggestions, I didn't actually have anything important on the back-ups so I just started using a different hard drive and its working perfectly again now.