MacOS Sierra - time machine stuck preparing backup on Network devices

My time machine was stuck on "Cleaning old backups" for almost a day. Once I stopped Sophos in less then 5 minutes the cleanup completed. Sophos was also preventing Disk Utilities First Aid from running on my external disks.

disabling Sophos also worked for me

Once the backup finished I reenabled Sophos and backups have been completing.

THANK YOU AND PLEASE APPLE AND SOPHOS PICK UP THE PHONE AND SOLVE THIS ISSUE I HAVE BEEN SIX DAYS DEALING WITH IT AND NO ONE YOU HEARD ME WELL NO ONE NEITHER AT THE GENIUS BAR OR CALL SUPPORT KNOWS WHAT IS GOING ON. FOR GOD SAKE APPLE DON'T RELEASE AN OS WITH AN ISSUE AS GRAVE AS THIS.

KONRAD YOU ARE THE BEST. CHAPAU!

Why are you yelling here, the 'phone' has been picked up,but as your post is so loud it may not be answered. Go back to typing normally

Thanks, I was thinking the same thing. Also based on the fact that this appears to be a Sophos problem that who should be the recipient of any shouting (as if that would do any good).

I'm sorry for yelling but when you have spent over 15 hours with "tech support" at the store and on the phone over 15 hours and 6 days on your own trying almost all logical possibilities, you have to scream at the Apple people for being so irresponsable and not trying every single variable. That is why they have a huge team of developers and engineers. They are not a start up company. At this point they should know better that they have to deliver, not "kind of deliver".

As well when all your work and personal work goes for 6 days with out back up, and you have to use either Dropbox or Cloud Drive, then what is the point of suggesting and seeing external hard drives. Granted I have a 5K with 4TB so the amount of information is large and a lot of media.

Apple is not alone in the market anymore to delay products on the shelves and making "boo boo's". Google, Samsung and many others have also big resources. I still don't understand why Apple doesn't put it's hand in it's pocket and buys Adobe, Dropbox and goes and spends 3 billion on Beats. Why? Adobe is the standard in the industry and Final Cut (if it exists) they ruined it. 238 Billion dollars buy you a lot of things specially when you have a machine like the Mac Pro and everybody uses a third party more powerful than your own tools.

Again sorry for screaming but it was 12:30 at night of the sixth day and I was tired and frustrated.

While I understand about you being tired and frustrated, based on the experience I had it was not an Apple problem, it was and is a Sophos problem. Therefore there was not a lot Apple support could do to solve the problem. I found the solution by doing some Google Foo and found out that other people had solved the problem by simply turning off Sophos online scanning. Once I was able to do a single back up I turned Sophos online scanning back on and my backups have run successfully since then.

I have the same problem Tried the SMC and PRAM reset but this had absolutely no effect. Also my backup disk was not indexing so the other suggestion didn't help.

This is a serious fault in Sierra which needs to be fixed urgently.

Same here. Deinstall of Sophos did the trick! TimeMachine making backups now as normal!

This worked for me.

Did you reinstall Sophos? And if so does TimeMachine still work

I did not uninstall Sophos, I just disabled online scanning. Once the backup completed I reenabled online scanning and backups have been successsfully running since then.

For what it's worth, uninstalling Sophos Home worked for me as well - TM backups to my Synology NAS now proceed as normal.

I will reinstall Sophos in a day or so and let you know what happens.

I had this problem also. I have discovered it is Sophos stopping Time machine from completing its back up.

Tested this a number of times with Sophos on - back up "stops", then with Sophos off, back up works perfectly.

Sadly though I would like some form of virus protection.

Apologies if the descriptors are average and in simple terms.

Disabling and or uninstalling Sophos (home) did it for me.

Tried combinations of white listing paths /Volumes/TimeMachine etc without effect (at the recommendation of Sophos)

For the moment, disabled.