Mac OS X Time Machine – Stuck on “Preparing Backup”
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/04/25
For one of my USB backup drives, Time Machine was stuck showing “Preparing Backup”.
tmutil (which has a lot of undocumented parameters) helped me out.
tmutil status would not show any change for hours either:
retinambpro1tb:~ root# tmutil status
Backup session status:
{
BackupPhase = ThinningPreBackup;
ClientID = "com.apple.backupd";
DateOfStateChange = "2015-05-04 19:27:31 +0000";
DestinationID = "01AE12C7-1D3E-469E-BE7E-32DA30F0030E";
DestinationMountPoint = "/Volumes/Elements2TB1";
Percent = "-1";
Running = 1;
Stopping = 0;
}
...
retinambpro1tb:~ root# tmutil status
Backup session status:
{
BackupPhase = ThinningPreBackup;
ClientID = "com.apple.backupd";
DateOfStateChange = "2015-05-04 21:13:28 +0000";
DestinationID = "01AE12C7-1D3E-469E-BE7E-32DA30F0030E";
DestinationMountPoint = "/Volumes/Elements2TB1";
Percent = "-1";
Running = 1;
Stopping = 0;
}
So I:
- removed the .inProgress file found by
ls -al /Volumes/Elements2TB1/Backups.backupdb/`scutil --get ComputerName`/*.inProgress - rebooted with the USB drive attached
- waited for spotlight to complete
- manually started a backup
- verified it made progress using tmutil (you need to run that as root, for instance with
sudo su -)
And it indeed made progress and finished:
retinambpro1tb:~ root# tmutil status
Backup session status:
{
BackupPhase = ThinningPreBackup;
ClientID = "com.apple.backupd";
DateOfStateChange = "2015-05-04 21:34:04 +0000";
DestinationID = "01AE12C7-1D3E-469E-BE7E-32DA30F0030E";
DestinationMountPoint = "/Volumes/Elements2TB1";
NumberOfChangedItems = 59584;
Percent = 0;
Running = 1;
Stopping = 0;
}
RetinaMBPro1TB:~ root# tmutil status
Backup session status:
{
BackupPhase = ThinningPreBackup;
ClientID = "com.apple.backupd";
DateOfStateChange = "2015-05-04 21:34:04 +0000";
DestinationID = "01AE12C7-1D3E-469E-BE7E-32DA30F0030E";
DestinationMountPoint = "/Volumes/Elements2TB1";
NumberOfChangedItems = 70162;
Percent = 0;
Running = 1;
Stopping = 0;
}
...
RetinaMBPro1TB:~ root# tmutil status
Backup session status:
{
BackupPhase = ThinningPreBackup;
ClientID = "com.apple.backupd";
DateOfStateChange = "2015-05-04 21:34:04 +0000";
DestinationID = "01AE12C7-1D3E-469E-BE7E-32DA30F0030E";
DestinationMountPoint = "/Volumes/Elements2TB1";
NumberOfChangedItems = 86254;
Percent = 0;
Running = 1;
Stopping = 0;
}
...
RetinaMBPro1TB:~ root# tmutil status
Backup session status:
{
ClientID = "com.apple.backupd";
Running = 0;
}
–jeroen
via: Mac OS X Time Machine – Stuck on “Preparing Backup”.
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