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Time Machine taking hours to 'prepare.'
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Jun 2007
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Title mostly says it all... I hit backup, it did. This was last night.
I come in today (macbook) hook it up, it says preparing...
Then still preparing
And still preparing.
For at least an hour and a half now.
I can hear the external accessing data, but that's it. SuggestionS?
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Jun 2007
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Well, after all that, it popped up an error:
"Time Machine could not backup this drive, an error has occured."
I ran disk util on both the main drive, and the backup drive, both reported no problems.
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Mac Enthusiast
Join Date: Oct 1999
Location: Santa Clara, CA
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First, make sure the external drive for the backup does not have a slash ("/") in it's name.
Second, remove /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist (this may not be the exact name, but I'm not at my Mac)
Third, trash the backup folder created by Time Machine on the backup drive.
Rerun the backup. Wait. Potentially overnight, depending on how much data you have to backup. Don't touch the computer until it's completed.
After the first painful full backup, incremental backups will be much faster.
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: ~/
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Originally Posted by JustinHorne 
Well, after all that, it popped up an error:
"Time Machine could not backup this drive, an error has occured."
I ran disk util on both the main drive, and the backup drive, both reported no problems.
I have the same problem on my MBP. No amount of preference trashing, restarting, toggling, reconnecting, reformatting/partitioning (external drive), etc., will get passed this same error. 
On my Mac Pro backing up to an internal drive, it works like a charm. 
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Senior User
Join Date: Aug 2002
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Offline
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i had the same problem the other night on my dual 2.7ghz g5, it kept saying preparing forever, and now all of a sudden it fixed itself and works again... i'm not sure why its doing that. very inconsistant.
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Jun 2007
Status:
Offline
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WEll, glad that I'm not the only one, sucks the problem exists at all...
HAving siad that...
LAst night, following the advice, and alittle more, I basicly ran all the utilities, forced all cron jobs, forced a spotlight re-index, totally formatted my backup drive, and then let it just SIT. DIdn't use the compy at all.
I went to bed, left it be yesterday, and it finished sometime between noon and 4 (started around... 9 pm)
This was backing up about 320 GB of stuff.
So, that's odd, but it's working now, really fast little updates. I suggest (though I don't know if it actually did anything) repairing all the drives, even if they report no errors, permissions repair, spotlight reindex, and format your time machine drive, then let it start over.
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