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Time Machine can’t get past “Preparing backup”

I’ve tried 4 times now to do a Time Machine backup. The first 3 times, I waited a half hour for it to get past “Preparing backup” before stopping it. The last time, I unplugged the external hard drive and plugged it back in, and tried again. Half hour, still preparing.


Notes:


macOS Catalina 10.15.4

The external drive is 2 TB, capacity, with 1.5 TB free.

The iMac has a 1 TB fusion drive, with 133 GB used.

The last Time Machine backup was on March 20, with about 3 hours usage since then, no new applications installed. Maybe a couple updates, new data.


I have to say I’m surprised. I expect this kind of “hanging” behavior from Windoze, not macOS. Am I expecting too much? It has taken a long time to prepare the backup the last few times I used Time Machine, but never this long. It used to take just a few minutes to prepare, maybe 5 or so.


Anybody have any ideas or comments?


ADDENDUM: It finally started backing up after about 40 minutes of preparing. I stopped the previous attempts after about 30 minutes. Is this what I should expect from now on? Is 40 minutes the new 5 minutes?

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Apr 14, 2020 6:27 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Apr 14, 2020 6:39 PM

Please read If Time Machine remains in the “preparing” stage on Mac.

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4 replies

Apr 14, 2020 6:44 PM in response to John Galt

Thanks, John. One point of interest in the article you linked is that the preparation can take a while if an update was recently installed. I can’t pinpoint the timeline exactly, but I may have installed the latest macOS update after the last backup and before this one, and the same may be true of the other recent backups.

Time Machine can’t get past “Preparing backup”

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