# Time Machine "Waiting to Backup" forever



## edgecrusherr (Jun 5, 2010)

Time Machine states: "Waiting to Backup", and never backs up. I first set up a backup drive last Friday, it is now the following Wednesday and a back up has never been performed. I have a another identical system, identical external hard drive, and it backs up with no problems.

External hard drive is Cavalry brand 1TB, SATA HDD, plugged in USB, formatted for GUID Partition table and Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and seems to operate fine other wise.

I've restarted the computer several times, ran disk permissions repair, and verified the boot dive. I've also reformatted the back up drive twice. The back up drive is named "MacPro2Backup", the boot drive is names "MacPro2 HD", both with no special characters.

This is the first time I've tried to set up a Time Machine back up on these computers (as stated before, the one computer works, the other doesn't). These computers have been working since January when we bought them used from someone who claims they work with no problems. We use these for design in a print/production environment.

I'd really appreciate any help anyone can give me. Thank you very much.


----------



## djackmac (Jun 5, 2010)

Sometimes you have to go to the change disk option in Time Machine preferences to select the disk to get things started. Worse case scenario you could go into disk utility and repartition/reformat the drive as MBR/MSDOS and then reformat again to GUID/HFS+ journaled and see if it sparks up Time Machine to recognize that drive again as new.


----------



## Whitehill (Jun 6, 2010)

I have had this problem, or something similar, when a TM backup is interrupted for any reason.  It can leave junk lying around on your backup disk that indicates a backup is in progress, so it won't start another one.  I don't recall the naming convention, but look in the top level of your backup disk for stuff named *-in-progress, or something like that.

Turn TM off, delete those files / folders, turn it back on - see what happens.


----------



## StarBuck (Jun 6, 2010)

Have a look at the console and post what its getting stuck at.


----------

