time machine stuck in 'preparing'

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time machine stuck in 'preparing'

Hello everyone

My time machine has been stuck in preparing for the last 3 hours, I'm leaving it with out doing anything with the hope that it might be fine by the morning, but I thought I would post what the time machine buddy widget shows me to see if any body can shed any light on the situation:

Starting standard backup

Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb

Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: deskstar applications_1

Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Macintosh HD

Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: deskstar storage

Node requires deep traversal:/ reason:kFSEDBEventFlagMustScanSubDirs|kFSEDBEventFlagReasonEventDBUntrustable|

Node requires deep traversal:/Volumes/Macintosh HD reason:kFSEDBEventFlagMustScanSubDirs|kFSEDBEventFlagReasonEventDBUntrustable|

Thanks

Ed.

PowerMac, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Mar 3, 2015 4:07 PM

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Answer 1

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BDAqua

Level 10

239,177 points

Mar 3, 2015 5:57 PM in response to Dread West

Hi Ed,

http://pondini.org/TM/D1.html

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Answer 2

Dread West Author

Level 1

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Mar 4, 2015 1:14 AM in response to BDAqua

Thankyou BDAqua

I checked out the article above which was useful, and I'm pleased to say that after leaving it in 'preparing' over night, time machine has begun to back up, and is reading 3.5 of 8.3 GB

however

I am now getting this message stacking up one on top of the other (there are hundreds) in the widget:

"Unable to rebuild path cache for source item. Partial source path."

Does anybody know what this means?

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Answer 3

redens17

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May 9, 2015 4:06 PM in response to Dread West

My backup finally finished. I've had the 'preparing' problem for two weeks now.

I didn't cancel it this time and it finished in just over 30 hours ⚠.

The actual backup took 2 seconds according to the Widget.

The only reason I can think of is that I downloaded a new version of OS X

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Answer 4

Jun 16, 2015 2:43 PM in response to BDAqua

Thanks for this.

I've tried to reset the time machine as per http://pondini.org/TM/A4.html and got to step 6, however when I delete the file and then go into Time Machine preferences it reappears (the back up disk is still showing). When I moved it to trash, I tried to empty trash but it said the file was still in use? I have rebooted as well.

Help!

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Answer 5

BDAqua

Level 10

239,177 points

Jun 16, 2015 3:37 PM in response to rayupnorth

Hi Ray,

Try it while booted in Safe Mode,holding Shift key at startup.

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Answer 6

Jul 28, 2015 3:50 PM in response to BDAqua

Thanks BDAqua

TM is now trying to back up to TC, however it's saying that it needs 430gb but only 164gb available - it seems that it's trying to do a new back up from scratch and is ignoring the fact that TC is holding previous back ups.

My thinking is to remove the old back ups (?) and start over again. We also have 1 more mac backing up to TC.

I've already tried deleting backups within TM (note there's only 2 back ups showing as active but there's many behind these 2 greyed out), but this didn't work. I then tried mounting within Disk Utility as per here, however it won't load the disk image (it says resource temporarily unavailable).

And I've tried this, however I'm unable to open the disk image (again, says unavailable).

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