Time Machine in High Sierra beings to prepare. Stops.

TuckerdogAVL

TuckerdogAVL

Registered
I upgraded to High Sierra, (10.13.6 current) I guess back in May. I just noticed today - August12, that my last backup was June 15th. I have 126gb of 1T available. There is 650gb used on the 1T hard drive. So, I go into my TimeM to maybe delete a back up or two and discover that the only backups I have go back only to May. 2nd surprise! So, Apple's tech support answer online is to "buy another harddrive." That seems a bit ridiculous as there should be no reason the TimeM isn't deleting old backs as we go.

But, the problem at this point is The BU gets to "preparing" then it just stops preparing and I get the "latest backup to back up June 15th etc etc. For kicks, I dragged the HD to the trash, then unplugged it, counted to ten, plugged it back it. The, I ran Disk utility first aid (just from USER, not installing in Safe Mode) and all appears okay. Everything appears to be okay; but I also assumed it was backing up for the past two months.

So, this isn't a "preparing" hang, though that was happening prior to ejecting and then reconnecting the hard drive.

So, what next?
 
Did you turn off Time Machine, then turn it on and reselect the specific hard drive?
 
Yes, I did. A couple times. But apparently the Disk Utility wasn't finished when I was posting this query (I thought it had). When I finished here, I saw the "DONE," closed everything out, rebooted and tried again. Though the Preparing took awhile, it actually went into time machine mode as far as I can see, and 70gb of 110gb has backed up in the past hour or so. As I was thinking about this: We have had some weird power outages (my favorite: the one where the power comes on and off and then on again in about 2 minutes; that's beloved by tech) and perhaps that something was screwed up there. Fingers crossed. So, turning on, turning off, checking to see that only the HD was being backed up (I also removed another external and checked it save as NO), then disk utility (as well as plugging/unplugging the external) all seemed to have worked. Thanks for the quick response.

PS: It has sort of stopped at 68gb for about five minutes now ...
 
The initial back up - which is what you are doing right now - does take a awhile. Leave it be for a while and try to stop fretting.

As to why it stopped working in the first place - I believe it has something to do with the new OS. High Sierra has some quirks.
 
Not fretting at all, if that came across. All good. Just wanted to share all the steps. I believe they all helped in their own way.
 
I have the same situation. I have a NAS system with 1.3T. I ended up deleting the entire backup streams as it would take hours preparing to take a backup. Yesterday, 4-20-2019, I started a brand new stream of backups at about 2 PM. I left the laptop running overnight only to find that the backup failed sometime during the night. Before it failed, I saw the "Preparing to backup" message. I would appreciate any input and or suggestions.

Javier
 
Why did the backup fail? Depends - Was the laptop set to put the main drive to sleep ? That would have explained the failure. Was the backup drive erased and formatted to start a fresh backup? Was there a corrupt file that prevented the backup from continuing ?

Your report should show the reason for the failure.
 
Here is the error message that was reported by TimeMachine. Please advice.

Javier
 

Attachments

  • Error.png
    Error.png
    39.9 KB · Views: 3
In the Time Machine Panel (System Preferences > Time Machine). Turn off Time Machine. Now Turn it back on, Click on Select Disk. You will get a window with your options. The first on the list is the original disk you selected. Under it is your options. Click on the drive you want to use from the list under the first one listed. This will trick Time Machine in thinking it is a new drive you want to use.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top