My time machine is stuck "cleaning up". Anyone have any ideas. I want to make sure I have a good backup.

Pondini created a guide for troubleshooting TM, please click Time Machine Troubleshooting and also use Time Machine FAQs. Bookmarking both may help in the future.

Stuck for how long?

Your welcome let's hope the EHD is OK.

Same problem here. It is stuck with the cleaning up. One thing I noticed, I entered Time Machine and it seems it is backing up every few minutes. I can go "back in time" in few-minutes intervals. Is that the case with others? This is with Mountain Lion, MacBook (Aluminum unibody, late 2008) and a Time Machine a generation or two old. Up until now (with the upgrade to Mountain Lion) I had no problem whatsoever.

A friend of mine, with latest Time Machine and MacBook Pro (15" Early 2011) is also having issues with time machine. We both upgraded a week or two ago to Mountain Lion.

Please use the troubleshooting links I provided in my first post.

I have a similar problem, and I could not find any answers in the links above. I can usually handle basic functions but have no command line foo.

I have an old MacBook Pro. Let's call her Goldy.

I bought a new-ish refurbed Macbook Pro, let's call her Jake.

I had Goldy backed up on Time Machine, and used Migration Assistant to migrate her data onto Jake from the last backup. I thought it would just grab files and apps, but it also grabbed user accounts, so all my data copied over fine but ended up in a duplicate of my old user account, separate from teh admin account I'm using on Jake. I figure, fine, no worries. I just gave the new(duplicate) user account admin permissions on Jake and all seemed fine.

I closed the connection between Goldy and the Time Capsule, so I still have all the data there just in case. All thedata and apps appear to be working fine on Jake (once I tracked down various software keys). So I'm ready to back it up.

I started the back up last night, and went to bed. It said "Cleaning up..." for a long time, not even seeming to get Time Machine open. I had already disabed sleep and made sure it was plugged in. This morning, no change, so I opened up Time Machine and there was no backup. I tried it again a few hours ago, and it's just stuck on "Cleaning up..." again.

I installed the TIme Machine widget and I see this:

"Waiting for index to be ready (101) [about 3o lines of this)

Network destination already mounted at: /Volumes/Data

Disk image already attached: /Volumes/Data/Bastet.sparsebundle, DIHLDiskImageAttach returned: 35

Disk image /Volumes/Data/Bastet.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups

Waiting for index to be ready (101) [many more lines of this]"

So I must have done something wrong?

technopatra, Time Machine (TM) has always been touchy - it either works and is brilliant or goes so slowly that it either isn't working properly or seems like it isn't. The pondini information mentioned above is very helpful, and I have spent hours in the past trying to fix TM and getting past "Waiting for index to be ready".

You probably haven't done anything wrong, the problem is most likely to do with TM and its interaction with the OS, e.g. Spotlight, wake-from-sleep (though not in your case), etc. One of the things I found helped was to reset Spotlight metadata so that it rebuilds its indexes. You can do this in Terminal with:

sudo mdutil -E / <Enter>

sudo mdutil -i on / <Enter>

I have also found that TM can sort itself out if you are *really* patient and leave it long enough. This doesn't sound helpful, but among all my 'fixing', I did try leaving TM for over a day once or twice, to find it did eventually finish, and after that, was back to normal speed .. until it went wrong again at a later date.

Other general pointers: When I moved to Lion, TM became extremely slow and the only solution was to delete the sparse bundle and start from a new backup. I have also long ago turned off Automatic backups, as I was wasting too long fixing every few weeks. Instead, I start a backup every evening or whenever. This situation may have improved by now but I don't want to experiment and waste time.

Since 'upgrading' to Mountain Lion (ML), I find Time Machine (TM) does it's backup but when you wake the MacBook TM says it's "Cleaning up..." and sticks on that for quite a while. However, if you wait long enough TM does eventually indicate the backup is finished, and reports that the time of the backup was e.g., hours ago, as though it will never get past "Cleaning up..." during sleep. This is one of the more minor problems ML has caused for me - the ML first release is very flaky.

I am running Mountain Lion on a MacBook Pro 15" from 2009. I had the same problem, where my Time Machine backup was stuck at "Cleaning old backups". Following the guides that you provided solved my problem, thank you!

Hi there.

Would you please assist? My MacBook's been in 'cleaning up' mode for over a couple of hours. 😟 I've spent the last 24 hours working on backing up the MacBook. This is the furthest it's gotten... and I'm really hoping it works.

I checked out the trouble shooting links but didn't come across anything specific to 'cleaning up'.

Thanks!

It can take a long time depending on how big your backup is and how 'old' the sparse bundle is. If you think the backup crashed, try to rebuild TM from the disc utility.

There isn't a section in the FAQ dedicated for when Time Machine is stuck in the "Cleaning Up" phase. The way I understand it, stuck is stuck, regardless of which phase it's stuck in.

So I followed section D1 in the FAQ, and this solved my problem. You might need to use section A4 and A7 along the way, but D1 will explain this in detail.

My mid 2010 MacBook Pro 15" started crashing after upgrading OS. It got a lot worse with Mountain Lion. When I took it in, Apple test hung up and I got a new free logic board. It was like I had a new computer and had to verify accounts.

I use a 1.5TB Seagate for backup and deleted all my "old" backups and am now backing up. I was concerned about how long "cleaning up" was taking and cruised in here. By the time I bookmarked your most exceleent reference site, it started backing up. About 10 minutes "cleaning up" time.

Thanks for your information, rkaufmann87. It was informative reading the information.

If none of the above worked (the Pondini website was informative but didn't work for my specific problem), try this.

I deleted old back-up files from my external HD (used for Time Machine back-ups) in order to make room for newer back-ups. Most of everything deleted and emptied from the Trash Bin okay but I noticed every time I connected the external HD, the Trash Bin fills up with "boot.efi" files from all the old back-up folders. And like everyone else here, my Time Machine gets stuck in "cleaning up" for hours on end. Tried all the tricks in the above website and didn't work. I kept on pressing "Empty" on the trash bin when my external HD is connected but these remaining "boot.efi" files just wouldn't empty. Then I found out via the Apple support forum that if you press down on "option" while clicking on "Empty," VOILA! Everything is deleted in the Trash that's related to the back-up/Time Machine drive.

And now when I connect my external HD to back-up with Time Machine... no more "cleaning up"! Just backing up files like it used to!!! If this is your situation the above solution may help.