I've backed up the files on my iMac yearly for several years. This year I realized that the progress
message of amounts backed up had not changed for several minutes. I believe that it is frozen,
but there are no error messages. What should I do?
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
Problem solved -- patience is the key, even in the middle of writing the
files to the backup. It took 40 minutes for Time Machine to move off
of Backing Up 2.74 GB ... There must be a huge number of small files.
It would be nice to get some finer grain status if desired.
Thanks for the suggestions and encouragement.
Problem solved -- patience is the key, even in the middle of writing the
files to the backup. It took 40 minutes for Time Machine to move off
of Backing Up 2.74 GB ... There must be a huge number of small files.
It would be nice to get some finer grain status if desired.
Thanks for the suggestions and encouragement.
Well, what does Disk First Aid report?
First check this...
Purging local backups
Please note that although this doesn't affect your remote backup from Time Machine, this will get rid of the redundancy (at least until the next Time Machine backup) that a local backup disk will provide. If you need such redundancy or are worried about the recovery of your data then you would be best served to let macOS determine when to purge these files.
Start Terminal from spotlight.
At the terminal type tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates.
Hit enter.
Here, you'll now see a list of all of the locally stored Time Machine backup snapshots stored on your disk.
Next you can remove the snapshots based on their date. I prefer to delete them one at at time. Once my "System" disk usage is at an acceptable level, I stop deleting but you can delete all of them if you want to reclaim all of the disk space.
Back at the terminal, type tmutil deletelocalsnapshots YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS , where will be one of the dates from your backup. This will be in the form of xxx-yy-zz-abcdef. Try to start with the oldest snapshot.
Hit enter.
Repeat for as many snapshot dates as required
http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2018/03/27/cleaning-up-time-machine-local-snapshots.html
tmutil deletelocalsnapshots / # deletes all the snapshots
And BTW, never delete stuff from the TM drive in the Finder.
Let it go, it may takes a long time to compute all the changes.
If not, the run Disk Utility's 1st aid on both drives.
Disk Utility First Aid reports 0 errors on the iMac 1TB hard drive (the system drive I'm backing up),
and 0 errors on the 1 TB Seagate external hard drive on which the backup exists.
I don't need the intermediate dates that Time Machine provides -- I'm just doing a backup in case everything
crashes. Should I delete the existing time machine file and do a full backup?
Thanks
No, this wasn't while it was computing changes, but in the middle of
writing the changes.
I will try that, but I'm not sure why I should expect it to work.
I turn TM on only to take the backup to the external drive,
and that is infrequent. Why would I get local backups?
Whew... good work my friend!:)
Time Machine freezes backing up my iMac - Mojave. How do I get a useful backup?
