Time Machine stopped working in Jan and never completes

I'm on a Mac Mini running Catalina 10.15.7.

I had an external drive I used for backups.

Some time in Jan was the last complete backup.

It's stuck here "Preparing backup..."

Nothing get written to the backup disk.

I removed the drive and put another there.

Same result, nothing completes.

The drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

It tests just fine.

What am I missing here?

I might have done the latest update to the OS in Jan. I can't remember.

On the options page of Time Machine it shows 399.19 GB estimated full backup

Please Help.

I've taken to copying massive files to another drive just to keep my data safe.

I have zero trust in this system now.

Posted on May 3, 2024 11:24 AM

Best reply

den.thed

Level 9

78,556 points

Posted on May 9, 2024 9:24 AM

w00die wrote:

Makes no sense the login items, one for the camera and one for the speaker would stop a backup. In fact it makes no sense any of the apps suddenly decided to break Time Machine after being there since before Jan.

Look again at Launch Daemons, Launch Agents, User Launch Agents and User Login Item.

I did clean up the apps. Trend Micro was installed in 2020 and deleted. It left something behind. I removed it. It didn't matter. None of the apps seem to matter except the Time Machine itself.

These things didn't break Time Machine. What they did was screw up your Mac, so that it could no longer backup.

Can't boot in safe mode for some reason. It hangs right before starting. Maybe the Time Machine is causing that too. I have no idea.

Safe Mode can take awhile to run. Perhaps 20 minutes or longer to fix a screwed up Mac.

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22 replies

hcsitas

Level 6

11,960 points

May 16, 2024 1:50 AM in response to John Galt

FWIW, my general rule for mystery external disk failures is “Old Man Time Machine is guilty unless proven otherwise”. Not for everyone but works perfectly for me: TM is permanently retired and never missed.