Hi,
Time Machine has been working fine for about a year but my last successful backup was 31 May. I have an external Lacie drive and am running OSX10.6.8. The Lacie drive is very active (lights flashing continuously), but the backup gets stuck cleaning up (for days).
Any advice would be much appreciated.
Thank you
Try repairing your backups, per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
Thanks for that pointer. I ran it on the Lacie drive and it worked fine ( I got all the lines of text as per the screenshot in the guide). However my next backup is again stuck on cleaning up and has been for over 24 hours now.
Any more ideas?
Sounds like there may be a partially-deleted backup, but usually it will give up after a while.
A clue should be lurking in your logs. Use the widget in #A1 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting to look at your logs. Locate the last couple of these hung/stuck/long backups, and copy and post the messages here.
Correction! Something has sorted this problem out and backups are now working fine. Many thanks for the guidance.
Have these pages been moved since me.comhas been shuttered for icloud?
Yes. The site was moved to http://pondini.org in November, 2011.
The link in question is now here: Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
Someone suggested excluding Dropbox from backups, that cured the problem for me.
Go to Time Machine Preferences,click on Options then click on the + sign and find your Dropbox Folder, click Save and that's it.
Time Machine won't stop cleaning up
