More Problems with Time Machine (Preparing)

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I know I'm not the first, but wondering if anybody knows why or what the solution is.

I'm using time machine and for a while now its been fine but..

The Problem I'm having now is I came to my computer this morning and it was "preparing to back up". Came back from a 10 hour day of work and its preparing. Can't get it to quit, hold the power button to force it to restart and now its doing the thing where on start up it refuses to go past a certain light blue screen unless I unplug the external drive where my Time Machine is.

This happened on my last Mac too. Anyone know why it does this or how to resolve the problem?

Bonus: I can prepare forever!
 
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i'm getting the same thing. for the last 2 weeks, I've been 'preparing' but it never does anything... i'm going to try a remote reset for the TC and see if that helps any. i've also been torrenting for a while, but i don't see how that would change it all of a sudden.
 
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well, that didn't work... still preparing. i've told it to stop. i've turned TM off... nothing makes it stop or do the actual backup...
 
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I had this problem once and it was because Time Machine/Time Capsule needed to reindex.

From the Console you can have a look at what Time Machine is doing and if you find something like "deep traversal" it means that it needs to reindex and this can take a while.
 
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so just leave it to keep preparing?
 
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That's what I did and it worked. Just make sure that you have the "deep traversal" thing which means that it's reindexing

Otherwise it might be another issue

In my case I had the issue following the interruption of a backup process before completion
 
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ok... not cool... no deep traversal....
 
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and then i get an error that the time capsule is read only and i'll have to pick another drive... now it's back to preparing....
 

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