Time Machine not backing up all the time

Hi all,

Time Machine - I have 2 external drives doing Time Machine backups. only one is plugged in at a time and I alternate them weekly.

Basically, everything has been working well until recently.

BTW: both drives have plenty of free space and they were recently formatted so the drive should be in good condition.

On back up number one, it backed up for a few days and then just stopped for some reason.

I kept trying to manually back up now and I could see that it was trying to do a backup and saying that it was backing up xxx megs out of xxx megs - but then it would just stop and not show that it finished with the new backup date.

So then I switched to the Second external after removing the first external. I tried to manually start a back up and it was doing the same thing– Looking like it was working but not finishing properly.

Then, I looked the next day – and all by itself it seem to have completed a back up properly.

However on the second drive if I say = 'back up now' - it does the same thing– looking like it's backing up but not completing with an updated completion date.

Q: so am I correct in thinking that I should be able to click back up now several times during the day and it would manually back up at that time properly?

Q: how can I get Time machine functioning better so that is more accurate?

Q: I thought it was supposed to back up on the hour but it seems to only be backing up once a day or so?

Q: - also in the past they have used the app called TimeMachineEditor. A few months ago I turn this off thinking Time Machine would go back to its normal state but maybe something got screwed up because of this app. Is there some way to go in there and delete TimeMachineEditor Preferences and make sure Time Machine is not using TimeMachineEditor anymore?