"waiting to complete first backup" forever

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WSE1951 Author

Level 1

47 points

"waiting to complete first backup" forever

I returned from a trip during which I upgraded to Big Sur. Two Time Machine backups connected to Apple Airport base stations on my WiFi network, (which previously backed up flawlessly using Time Machine unattended) gave me "could not complete backup" error messages with no further explanation.

Since I had other good backups, I used the Time Machine preference pane to remove those backups and start new ones on the same 2 hard drives. Both said something like 'ready for first backup" and then Time Machine queried each of them, briefly saying "preparing backup" and then the status of that backup changed to "waiting to complete first backup" but in fact Time Machine stopped attempting to back up and moved on to the next backup on the last.

Both of these hard drives can be seen in Finder, so it doesn't seem like a network issue.

Time Machine completes backups to other hard drives which are directly connected to the computer without complaint. But these previously-reliable network drives will no longer work with Time Machine.

Any suggestions appreciated. OS 11.2.3 on 16-inch 2019 Intel MacBookPro. Drives are 8 Tb Western Digital connected via USB-3 to vintage Apple base stations, which themselves are connected via Ethernet to UniFi router.

Posted on Apr 5, 2021 9:21 PM

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Answer 1

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WSE1951 Author

Level 1

47 points

Apr 6, 2021 5:30 PM in response to MoonJ.

I wound up calling Apple Support, they brought in a Senior Advisor and we did a screen share. It wound up taking about 75 minutes, but we get it running again. He'd never seen this issue before. What wound up working was changing the name of my computer in Sharing preference pane, then deleting the prior Time Machine backup and starting a new one.

What was causing the problem was that Time Machine's stored password for the prior backup would not open it, even though I had not changed the password. I tried replacing the password in Keychain, that did not help. I tried deleting and restarting the backup, but because an existing backup with the same name could not be opened, this failed.

Once the new backups started, to delete the old backups I had to option-select showing the Show Package Contents option. Then I deleted the individual bands ... 7,500 of them which took more than an hour. Only then could I delete the old backup

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Answer 2

MoonJ.

Community Specialist

Apr 6, 2021 3:50 PM in response to WSE1951

Hello WSE1951,

It sounds as though you're having issues backing up to an AirPort base station using Time Machine, but no issues backing up to externals directly connected to your Mac. Knowing that you're able to perform backups to hard drives connected to your Mac greatly helps with isolating the issue, and the troubleshooting steps. To start it's recommend to try the steps outlined in the following article. In the article you'll find links to additional steps depending on the error or symptom that you're experiencing to ensure you're able to reach a resolution.

Time Machine troubleshooting on Mac

If you continue to have issues after completing the steps you'll want to reach out to Apple. You can find available contact information Apple via their Get Support website.

Take care!

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"waiting to complete first backup" forever

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