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IF you were successful you should see your backup start. Time Machine will still give you the Preparing backup… message but this time it should only last at most 5 minutes. You can initiate a backup manually by clicking on the Time Machine icon in the Menu Bar and choosing Back Up Now. Your Time Machine probably runs every hour, which means you’ll have to wait to see if it worked, right? Not really. When Spotlight is done working its magic, there’s one last step. This reindex should fix your hanging issues when trying to do a backup.
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Make sure your Time Machine drive is connected while the restart is happening.ĭeleting this file and restarting with the Time Machine drive attached should force Spotlight to reindex the drive. RestartĬlick on the Apple logo in the upper left corner of your Menu Bar and choose Restart. The file should only be about 3-5kb, so you’re not deleting a backup file, but instead a progress and change log of sorts. Select this inProgress file and delete it. There should be a file here that ends in.
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Here, you’ll see a list of all your most recent backups. There, find the Backups.backupd folder and open it up. Open up a Finder window and navigate to your Time Machine drive. Now that you’ve stopped the bad backup it’s time to fix the issue. You’ll know the backup stopped when the progress bar goes away and Preparing backup... disappears. This can be found in the Time Machine preferences window we just looked at. The first step is to click the X button next to the progress bar to cancel the current backup. If something is wrong you’ll probably see this screen saying Preparing backup... If that’s the case follow the steps below. If you notice your Time Machine drive running for far more time than you think a regular backup should take, open up Time Machine preferences ( System Preferences > Time Machine. If your Time Machine gets stuck on this step for more than 10 minutes when you backup regularly, something’s probably wrong.įear not, as there’s a fix for this that should get you backing up again in no time. There are some issues that can come up from time to time, most notably the “Preparing Backup” issue that seemingly locks up your Time Machine backups. This doesn’t mean that Time Machine is perfect, far from it. Since then it’s become the best way to back up your Mac. Time Machine for OS X was first introduced all the way back in 2004 in OS X Leopard.