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I have attached an external drive I have used to make an initial backup, and now I have, after a few months, attached that same external disk to the computer in order to update the backup. I have been looking at "Preparing to backup" for way too long now. Is it time to reformat that external drive and start a new backup? Why is this not working for me?
Thanks in advance.
MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2), Late 2012 Model
Oh, it is now saying "calculating time remaining", so there is hope that the Time Machine has actually recognized that the disk was designated as a backup, and it now preparing to update that backup.
Is this how it is supposed to work?
The amount of data I have is relatively, actually, pretty small.
And it says about 3 hours remaining to back up 41.57 GB.
Is that reasonable?
First time around - sure
The subsequent backups are incremental and take several minutes
Time Machine is optimized for Hourly Backups. If you wait more than a few days, it has to do what is known as a "deep traversal" and look at everything, and that can take a while.
As long as it is still making progress, however slowly, it is fine. It is intended to work at very low priority in the background, and not interfere with the work you are doing in the foreground. It is NOT optimized to be done quickly.
Time Machine's "claim to fame" is that it does not interfere with your work, so you can just leave it running all the time, or frequently. Then, when you need it, it is the backup that actually got done, instead of a more focused Backup that is perfect for you, but has not been run in a month because it is too much trouble.
Thanks everyone. If Time Machine is meant to be an hourly thing then it is not for me. As a home user of this computer I have no reason to back up every hour. I need to make it a point that whenever I install a software I make a backup. And then in between I just back up my documents manually by copying them to a safe external place.
When I first read about Time Machine, I thought, "I will only use that if I can stretch out the time Interval a lot." so I looked up that there was a way to do that.
I started Time machine, and when I went to check up on it, I found it had already made one BIG backup and six little ones. and it had not gotten in the way once. So I just left it.
It's nice not to have to worry about that anymore. The computer does the stuff computers are good at, without being annoying. It's refreshing.
Time Machine - Preparing to Backup For Ever
