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Time Machine stuck Preparing Backup...

Time Machine was working well, then began getting stuck on Preparing Backup...

Things tried:

— Letting ”Prepare Backup…” run overnight

— Turned Back Up Automatically off/on

— Added back up drive to Privacy in Spotlight

— Removed the .inProgress File

— Removed/Selected Disk

— Restarted

— Ran First Aid, all good

— Checked to see if Spotlight was indexing, it wasn’t

— Checked Activity Monitor to see if mdworker has in play, it wasn’t

I got it working again once by wiping the drive and starting again (27 hour initial back up). Thought all was good until it got stuck immediately on subsequent back up.

‘Subsequent backups’ seem to be the issue, maybe?

Anything else I can try?

Thanks,

OS High Sierra 10.13.6

No antivirus software

No software updates

Nothing new/different was installed

New external USB drive healthy/plenty of room

Mac Pro, macOS 10.13

Posted on May 14, 2020 1:54 PM

Top-ranking reply

Wonderwall1234 Author

Level 1

5 points

Posted on May 14, 2020 3:15 PM

UPDATE:

The subsequent backups seem to be working now. I let 'Prepare' run for approx 45 mins. There was a large amount of data added that I had not accounted for, so that's why the subsequent back up stayed on 'Preparing...' for a long while. This doesn't explain the initial reason why it stopped/got stuck backing up but I'm good for now.

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Time Machine stuck Preparing Backup...

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