Time Machine Waiting to Complete First Backup to external hard-drive / cannot complete backup

Spencejam1 wrote:

Hello,

Trying to complete a backup before reinstalling macOS Catalina. My Mac mini has many corrupted files (have already verified this with tech support). However, now it is impossible to do the backup (external hard drive is new, I bought it for this purpose).

Any clues?

As a PS I am going to copy in the text of the errors and faults window from Console - which, as you may expect is very long. But maybe someone will pull the needle out of the haystack by scrolling through? Have no idea if this is useful, but here it goes - thanks in advance to all ye who enter here:

<Partial list of Console Errors and Faults messages.log>

"Time Machine has completed a new backup for you, or get a message saying it can't create the backup,"

or “failed to complete the backup, ” or “Preparing backup”

This message reappearing the TimeMachine disk is operating in a state of failure and will continue to fail with increasing frequency the course of action would be replace the drive.

Learn more about backup disks that you can use with Time Machine —https://support.apple.com/kb/HT202784

In addition to Leroy's correct suggestion to replace the Time Machine drive, you should also obtain a second separate physical drive to use to "clone" your primary (internal) drive. It is possible that your Mac Mini has so much corruption that Time Machine cannot work properly, but a "clone" type backup may well succeed. Programs like SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner can do such clones, and those clones can be used for migrating over your files to your new system, as Migration Assistant works with both Time Machine backups as well as clone type backups.

It is also possible that your internal drive is failing and getting some type of reliable backups of at least your user files (software and applications can be reinstalled) is something you should do asap.