Long Prep time for Time Machine Backup

Depends on many factors...

EtreCheck is a simple little app to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Pastebin is a good place to paste the whole report...

https://pastebin.com/

Or use the paperclip at the bottom of a Reply to attach the full report here. :)

I'm in a very similar situation. My Time Machine was sitting at "Preparing Backup" for three days.

This is after I went to a new HD, thinking my old one had failed after it hadn't backed up in a week.

I have tried:

1. removing the .inProgress file and rebooting
2. Disk First Aid on the Backup drive
3. Running EtreCheck and reinstalling Norton Security
4. Lots of reboots
5. Verifying that my backup drive is on the latest firmware
6. (And that's after starting with a new backup drive)

No effect, any of it. So little feedback from an intelligent system.

In my case “Preparing Backup…” has been taking days. I have a hard time keeping my MacBook Pro (with 1.42 TB of the SSD used) on the network for long enough to get it to start backing up. Because of those circumstances, I haven’t had a complete backup since December 1.

What is going on?

I am tempted to wipe out the existing backup on my server and start from scratch.

I find TM quite quirky...

Carbon Copy Cloner...

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

Give Tri-Backup a try, it can do everything & far more than TM can do...

https://www.tri-edre.com/english/tribackup.html

I find TM quite quirky...

Carbon Copy Cloner...

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

Give Tri-Backup a try, it can do everything & far more than TM can do...

https://www.tri-edre.com/english/tribackup.html

I do already use CCC for a comprehensive, Daily Backup, but Time Machine's ease of use for retrieving a file from history is beyond what CCC can do.

The hourly backups for 24 hours, daily for the past month, weekly for prior months is an amazing way to keep some history of backup.

I do not see how TriBackup does that.

I do currently use Time Machine to back up to an Xserve (will have to find an alternative soon) locally, at my house. I use Arq to back up to Wasabi, in order to have an offsite backup, in case the house burns down or the entire basement is flooded.

But I am concerned about Time Machine not being able to establish the initial backup, because it keeps preparing for too long. I have a laptop, and I do have to take it places. It used to be that it got backed up, whenever I had it on the home WiFi overnight.

That said, I am actually on the “Verifying Backup…” step now.

On Tri-Backup, from an older PDF..

You can schedule the execution of the action to have it executed periodically, so that the copy is updated regularly.

The "Programmed Actions" have been designed to perform copy and backup operations transparently. They keep your settings (you do not have to redo the setting each time) and run automatically (you can also run it manually). Their execution is done in the background and you can continue to use your computer during this time. Note: The automatic execution may be programmed according to various criteria (frequency, the mounting of a disk or on quitting an application, etc.) and may be associated with a context (home, office, nomad). You can choose certain actions to be executed only in the current context (for example, that certain actions execute at the office and not when your computer is at home). Note: The manual execution can be done from the Programmed Actions panel of Tri-BACKUP 8, but also from the Tri-BACKUP 8 Scheduler process, with the possibility of using quick launch shortcuts. The "Immediate Actions" were created to visualize, check and compare the contents of folders or disks, when you wish to check the content, or if you want to choose specifc fles or folders to copy or treated. You can create as many different actions as necessary.

Note: Once you have defned actions, you can quit Tri-BACKUP 8. The automatic execution of your actions will be managed by other applications described below.

The automatic execution of actions is managed by a process (a standalone application called "Tri-BACKUP 8 Scheduler" or Scheduler) that runs continuously in the

background and launch actions based on what you decided. This process displays a small icon in the menu bar.

And Page 69 of this PDF...

https://www.tri-edre.com/pub/files/tribackup8en.pdf

Have a look here http://osxdaily.com/2014/03/31/time-machine-stuck-preparing-backup-mac-fix/

That doesn’t work with my setup, because the backup destination is a shared volume on an Xserve running macOS Server.