You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Over 40,000 changes found since last back-up and back-ups routinely taking multiple hours.

I am using Time Machine and back-up to an external 2T hard drive with a MacBook Air and MacOS 12.2.1

When Time Machine goes to do a back-up after one hour or less since the last back-up, it said that it finds over 40,000 changes and that the back-up is going to take up to 14 hours. This is not the first back-up to this hard drive, though the problem existed before, so I purchased a new hard drive a few weeks ago. This is an ongoing problem. My computer has 156.16GB stored on a 500GB hard drive. The back-up has 1.3TB or 2TB used.

Is there a way to safely delete Time Machine and re-install it? (Right now, it is saying: "17.9% done and about 14 hours remaining." Sometimes the back-up stalls and needs to be restarted.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Feb 18, 2022 5:09 PM

Top-ranking reply

lllaass

Level 10

210,459 points

Posted on Feb 19, 2022 1:31 AM

You can erase the Time Machine disk and start over.

That is what I would do.

When did you start this ™ disk? If not formatted in APFS format it seems then those seem to cause problems.

If you have files on the current ™ drive and want to keep those I would get a new disk and start using that.

View in context

Over 40,000 changes found since last back-up and back-ups routinely taking multiple hours.

Similar questions