When I backup Time Machine it's just stuck on Preparing. I've tried stopping it then starting again. I've also tried dismounting the drive then remounting then backing up
View 24 RepliesI just updated to 10.5.8 and my Time Machine will not backup. It is stuck at "Preparing Backup". I tried rebooting and it did not work.
View 10 Replies View RelatedI was using a 1TB drive for Time Machine; I've now upped it to a 3TB drive. The new drive is an exact copy of the old one. But when I try to do a Time Machine backup, it's been stuck in "Preparing Backup..." for over 12 hours.
Info:
Mac OS X (10.7.3), 2.5 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
When I open Time machine in my system preferences it says "preparing" is this normal? Is it really backing up?
View 4 Replies View RelatedNone of the issues discussed in the apple support page on this issue seem to apply to me (except one below regarding not completing the 'prepare for backup'). It still takes way too much time (a night is not enough) to prepare for time machine backup, even though there was a backup recently, and it is not a one-time event but a recurring problem, and there are no big changes to my files or disks.And of course because most days it does not complete the backup before I have to leave to work, the condition on 'not interrupting the backup' cannot be respected. This looks like plain poor design.The only thing that helps is to connect my laptop directly to the Time Machine by Ethernet but it is very inconvenient.
Info:
MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
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.
I use Firewire 800, and my external has 80GB free on it. Both it and my iMac's drives are 320GB. What's with the extended period of preparation, going on 15 minutes now, maybe longer. Backup still didn't begin, this never used to happen me before. I only backed up 2 days ago?
Also, why when I click the Time Machine menubar item to open Time Machine prefs does the DVD (iLife '09) in my optical drive make a noise as if it's being accessed? It spins up a little too. Seems very odd, and it's not a coincidence, it happens exactly when I try to open Time Machine prefs from its menubar item. I could do it 5 times in succession and the optical drive would make the same accessing noise each time, on cue
It just says "Preparing Backup..." It stays like this forever until I stop it and I tried re-connecting the hard drive. Why won't this work? I tried re-starting...
View 6 Replies View RelatedRunning the latest Lion software 10.7.4 ..Time machine is looping " preparing backup' ...using Time Capsule 500 gb storage...2 MBP back up to this system..one Snow Leopard and the one Lion. Â
Time machine is showing 30 MB available... problem appears to be that the old backups are not being deleted no storage is available and it fails to create any additional new backups.. Problem occured in March and I needed to erase the entire backup disk and start over to clear the issue.. It went successfully..now the same prob 3 months later.Â
My backup is about 181 gb the other is about 100 gb.. why this may be occurring? Obviously the root cause issue was not resolved by deleting the entire disk..Â
Info:
Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
Am I understanding correctly (from reading some other discussions here) that there are issues with Time Machine back ups and Yosemite, and that it's not just me having these problems? Since I upgrade I am having major issues with wifi connection being dropped and my Time Machine hasn't performed a back up in 19 days. It looks as though it will but stalls at "preparing back up". When it finally stops I get an error message saying it can't find the disc. I've restored the Time Machine to factory settings and started over more than once but still get the same message. Am I doing something wrong or is this an Apple issue?
Info:
MacBook Pro
I'm a rather new Mac user (it's been about 6 months since I bought my new aluminum iMac). Lately, I've been experiencing difficulties in shutting down my system, or even restarting it. I should probably note that I'm using 10.5.2 Sometimes, when I try to perform a system shutdown/restart, the OS gets to a point where only my desktop is shown but nothing happens (occasionally the beach ball keeps rolling, but not always).
At that point, (as far as I know) there's nothing I can do to restart/shutdown the system, besides pressing the "power" button for several seconds until the power goes down. When similar things happened on my old XP machine, I would just use CTRL ALT DEL and force quit all applications - until shutdown succeeds. There was never a scenario where I needed to cut the power in order to get the system to shut down. On OS X when this situation occurs, the CMD ALT ESC combo doesn't seem to work.
I have been using Time Machine on a MacBook Pro for months to back up to a LaCie back up drive. All worked fine until January--since then, when TM is scheduled to back up, I get a "preparing" message that can run for hours, and eventually (though not always) I get an error message. I typically back up through a wireless network (TM creates a Sparsebundle) but I also tried connecting my laptop directly to the back up drive and that doesn't work either. As far as I can tell, there is nothing wrong with the laptop's hard drive--and there is plenty of room on the back up drive for all the content. MacBook is running OS X 10.5.8.
Info:iMac Intel duo 20-inch, Mac OS X (10.5.6), Also own iMac G5 1.33 Ghz and iBook G4 laptop
I recently moved and backed up an imac I left behind as well as my macbook using Time Machine. Everything was fine until Feb 27 when I was hit by a car and spent the next several weeks away from the computer. When I did get the laptop back, I didn't have the backup drive. Until a few days ago. So I reconnect and the backup starts with no problem until it finally tells me that I am out of space on the drive. I decided that I should just dump the imac time machine folder since I had a duplicate on another drive. That was much more complicated than I expected but I finally reclaimed a lot of space. The problem is that now when I connect time machine, it just says preparing backup. I can enter time machine and see my last date before the accident, even going back into last year. But it won't back up any more. Â
I've looked at the forums and on one suggestion deleted the com.apple.TimeMachine.plist file after disconnecting the drive and then reconnecting everything but to no avail. Here is the message on the Time Machine Widget buddy
Starting standard backup
Backup requested by user
Backing up to: /Volumes/2TB BB/Backups.backupdb
Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Macintosh HD
Node requires deep traversal:/ reason:kFSEDBEventFlagMustScanSubDirs|kFSEDBEventFlagReasonEventDBUntrustable|Â
My first thought would be that the backup I trashed was the one for the macbook and not the imac but the last saved dates would all be wrong and it wouldn't explain my ability to enter time machine and look back at my computer's history. Anyway, At this point I really want to just have a complete back up that I can use to wipe my drive and reinstall everything.
Info:
MacBook (13-inch Late 2006), Mac OS X (10.5.8)
Just under a month ago my time capsule ran out of space. My understanding is that when that happens time machine starts deleting old backups, that is certainly what it has done in the past.This time it just has not deleted anything. I deleted several of the older backups via the time machine interface and still it isn't backing up The log is just full of
01/03/2012 23:14:53.613 com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (101)
Is there anyway to fix this problem without just wiping out all my backups,why time machine isn't automatically deleting older backups as it is suppose to?
Info:
Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7)
My MBP seems to be stuck on "VMware Fusion is preparing your Boot Camp partition to run as a virtual machine. This may take a few minutes. This will only happen once." The bars are still moving and it doesn't appear to have crashed but it's been running for over 2 hours.. is this normal or should I restart it?
View 2 Replies View RelatedI had an external hard drive that was formatted to NTFS that was used on my PC but I want to switch it over to mac now. I erased the partition on Windows, then plugged it into my mac but it's stuck at 'preparing to partition the disk'. What should I do, it's been stuck for ages!!
Info:
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5), 13" Late 2012 model
I am trying to burn a 2GB Quicktime movie to a DVD-R using Toast 8. The file goes through the encoding process then gets stuck on 0% the "preparing" stage. Has anyone had this happen and how did you fix it.
View 1 Replies View Relatedwhenever I run Time Machine on my PowerBook G4 (1.5 Ghz / 1Gb RAM / OSX 10.5.8) it will eat up GB's of hard disk space while 'preparing the backup'. After that it finishes the backup, but I don't get the space back. I'm talking about the internal HD, not the external target disk of course. Does Time Machine use the space to generate some temporary files? Any ideas how I can get my disk space back
I've finally gotten Snow Leopard on my Mac Book Pro, after jumping through hoops to get there - Disc not GUID, then when it was, SL not believing that the disc was bootable.
Due to this, I nuked the hard drive, installed SL and then restored all settings and apps from my latest time machine back up, whilst physically cabled to my Airport Extreme Base Station. Whilst I left it do that, it finished the restore, and also did a couple of hourly back ups. All hunky dorey so far.
Now that I'm using wireless, I notice that Time Machine kicks in as normal to do a back up. The icon starts whizzing round, and it starts calculating the changes to back up. But that's it. It progresses up to 99%, and then just sits there. I've left it like that for several hours, to see if it's actually going to complete, but nothing happens.
Is there something I can look at to see if I can prod it into action?
My backups go to a Drobo hanging off a Power Mac G4 on FW800, physically networked to the AEBS.
Last week my macbook crashed and it turns out its a hard disk failure, so I fixed it and restored it using time machine, after restoring it I restarted it then when the apple logo appears, a box saying to restart the computer by pressing the power button in a couple of messages! I restart then the same thing!!!! what to do! I have exams and projects I need my mac! Just a note: the mac was working properly after fixing the hard disk before restoring!
View 4 Replies View RelatedI'm having issues restoring from a time machine back-up. My old system was running 10.6, and I am using 10.5 install discs. I've tried it from various backups and I always get a 'you need to restart your computer' message upon booting up. I've now given up and just re-install 10.6 a fresh. I'm fairly confident restoring my music and documents wont be a problem, but will I be able to just drag and drop my apps onto my HDD? Do I need to copy the library folder across too, or is it just not possible and I'll have to start a fresh?
View 1 Replies View RelatedI installed a new hard drive on my iMac and got it up and running. I'm trying to restore my computer from the time machine and it says 168 hrs to complete. I've tried it twice and it gets about 7% done until I get an error that says I must restart and try again.
Info:
iMac
I set up Time Machine the yesterday, it completed it's initial backup fine, and performed about 10 or so hourly backups, then randomly on one of it's hourly backups it got stuck. It never actually started the backup. The preferences said it was backing up, but the progress bar wasn't moving, and there was no activity on the drive. I stopped the "backup", and from then on I could not get it to do another backup.
So last night I reformatted the external and decided to let TM start over. Once again it finished the initial backup fine, and I went to bed. While I was in bed it finished 3 more hourly backups, and I woke up this morning to find it stuck again, trying to do it's 2:05AM backup. The computer was awake all night, so it should have no problems. The preferences say it is backing up, but never makes any progress, and there is no drive activity.
Here is the relavent errors from my System log:
Nov 1 02:05:50 todd-sullivans-imac /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[304]: Backup requested by automatic scheduler
Nov 1 02:05:50 todd-sullivans-imac /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[304]: Starting standard backup
Nov 1 02:05:57 todd-sullivans-imac /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[304]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb
Nov 1 02:05:57 todd-sullivans-imac /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[304]: Ownership is disabled on the backup destination volume. Enabling.
Nov 1 02:05:57 todd-sullivans-imac KernelEventAgent[35]: tid 00000000 received unknown event (256)
Nov 1 02:05:59 todd-sullivans-imac /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[304]: Event store UUIDs don't match for volume  Macintosh HD
Nov 1 02:05:59 todd-sullivans-imac /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[304]: Node requires deep traversal:/ reason:kFSEDBEventFlagMustScanSubDirs|kFSEDBEventFlagReasonEventDBUntrustable|
Nov 1 02:09:45 todd-sullivans-imac /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[304]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 14.57 GB requested (including padding), 132.30 GB available
Nov 1 02:09:46 todd-sullivans-imac /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[304]: MDBackupBegin() returned result (909) > 0, waiting
Nov 1 02:10:16 todd-sullivans-imac /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[304]: MDBackupBegin() returned result (906) > 0, waiting
Nov 1 02:10:46 todd-sullivans-imac /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[304]: MDBackupBegin() returned result (906) > 0, waiting
I bolded the entries that I assume are the problem, but I don't know what it could be. Why does it randomly get stuck on hourly backups. BTW The "waiting" is just repeating over and over etc. Tried it a 3rd time, and this time it managed to do 25 hourly backups before getting stuck. does anyone have a clue here, I'd like to get this working. Every time it stops working I have to format the drive and start over to get it to backup again.
I installed SL a few days ago and had to rebuild my Time Machine backup. It powered through all 700GB today and then it kept going. The progress bar got to the max: 700/700, then went to 700.02/700.02 ,, 700.03/700.03 ,, 700.04/ 700.04 ,, etc. Currently it's adding onto the "inprogress" file and filling up the drive with more data than I had to backup! It's done 844GB out of 700. Keep in mind, this is a totally-from scratch backup here! Do I stop it? Do I wait until it fills up the drive and "figures it out" ?
View 1 Replies View RelatedI installed a new 500 GB HD on my 13-inch mid 2010 Macbook Pro (since the original crashed). I successfully connected to the Disk Utility via the internet connection and started recovery from a recent Time Machine backup....but, the computer will not restart. It's been stuck in the grey screen with the Apple logo and rotating status bar all night. I shut it down and restarted, but it won't go past the grey screen state. I can't find any answers on the Support Page. Should I have first installed the Lion OS X first and then restored from the Time Machine backup? Â
Also, wondering if all my programs (2011 ILife & IWork and Microsoft Office) will be reinstalled with the back up? (I can't find my installation disks for ILife and IWork :-()
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
I have been trying to backup my computer for the longest time. It has been stuck on (53.4MB of 62.5MB) for about 45 minutes now. Any ideas? It is on an ethernet connection.
View 3 Replies View RelatedLast night I accidently deleted some files off my desktop. I went into Time Machine to restore them and thought I had made the correct selection but instead it appears that I changed ALL the backups to the current state of my desktop. I've checked other folders on my hard drive and they all seem to be identical throughout the dates in Time Machine instead of each being unique as well. Is my Time Machine stuck and not saving properly or was it something I possibly did? Is there a way to undo that or am I now stuck?
Info:
Mac Pro 2008, Mac OS X (10.6.7)
I'm using a my book western digital nas drive for my time machine backups and time machine has been stuck on indexing for days. I saw some solutions in other threads, however on the my book the backup partition of the drive is private, locked, or hidden? and I have no idea how to get into that area of the drive if I was going to apply any of the solution I have previously seen...
Info:
MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
I am trying to create a backup of my hard drive with Time Machine, but every time I do it gets stalled. Sometimes it gets stalled during the backup, other times it just gets stuck during preparation. The reason I need this backup is because I want to update to Snow Leopard (so I can buy Mountain Lion when it is available) and I want to be sure I won't lose any data on my computer. I am using [URL] (2 TB). I have tried using Disk Utility to make a backup but that froze too.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.8)
Ok... So, I have an extremely slow Time Machine backup. Many people do. I've gone through the motions and tried to resolve the issue by doing the suggested restart in Safe Mode. I even followed some of the other tips that are on this string: slow time machine backupÂ
Nothing has worked. I don't use Norton Symantec but I didn't the Norton Remove script through the Console already. I don't run any anti-virus software. Â
This started when I was backing up to at Time Capsule. I backed up to the TC for years before this started. I then moved to backing up (started fresh) to a external HD connected via USB.Â
I have a 2010 Mac Mini with OS X 10.9 (Latest Version)Â
