Time machine taking forever preparing backups

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I run the most current version of mavericks OSX. Lately it seems that it has been taking way longer than usual to prepare backups. Today after 35min. I gave up. I backup every other day and its not like there is really much to backup. I mean very little. Does anyone know what gives? it's rather frustrating.

I also have CCC on a separate external hd which I also run every other day. Do I need to take this into account?
 
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Do you use a VM (Parallels ,Fusion Virtual Box ) and run Windows or Linux?
 
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chscag

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Use Disk Utility and run a verify on your Time Machine external hard drive. It shouldn't be taking 35 minutes to prepare a backup unless there's something wrong with the drive or some data is corrupted.
 
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Use Disk Utility and run a verify on your Time Machine external hard drive. It shouldn't be taking 35 minutes to prepare a backup unless there's something wrong with the drive or some data is corrupted.

I ran Disk Utility and repaired. No change.
 

chscag

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You're saying that Disk Utility made repairs on the external hard drive? If so, did you run it again to verify that there were no more repairs to be made?
 
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Here is the trick.
open the console.app and look in the log files for events marked as " com.apple.backupd " and look at what time machine is doing.
If it is doing a deep traversal of your disk, or verifying it's database, that can take a long time.
Golden advice is to let Time Machine finish what it started, even if it takes a very long time.
If you interrupt it, the next time it will take even longer. :)

So have a look at those logs and see what happens in the background.

Cheers ... McBie
 
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Time machine still taking a very long time. Should I reformat it? Start from beginning?
 

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chas_m

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Since Time Machine is only a backup of what you already have, if you feel confident you still have everything you want on your boot drive then yes, you can reformat the backup drive and set up Time Machine again. Obviously it will want to do a complete backup again as part of that initial setup, but after that things should behave as normal.
 

Rod


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Have you excluded your CCC backups from Time Machine. I dont suppose you have both drives hooked up at the same time but if you do (as I do) you should exclude your CCC backup drive otherwise poor old Time machine will be backing up your backup thus doubling (or more) the amount of data to be copied.;)
 
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Have you excluded your CCC backups from Time Machine. I dont suppose you have both drives hooked up at the same time but if you do (as I do) you should exclude your CCC backup drive otherwise poor old Time machine will be backing up your backup thus doubling (or more) the amount of data to be copied.;)

I always run CCC apart from my TM backups. I did reformat my external hd and started fresh. I will see what happens on my next backup.
 

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No worries, the first one does take a while though, after that 10 mins is reasonable.
 
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No worries, the first one does take a while though, after that 10 mins is reasonable.
Yeah it only took a couple of hours. I figure it's worth eliminating the time and grief.
 
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open the console.app and look in the log files for events marked as " com.apple.backupd " and look at what time machine is doing.
If it is doing a deep traversal of your disk, or verifying it's database, that can take a long time.

For me, it took 40 minutes to prepare the backup (for 152 GB of changes — I hadn't backed up to Time Machine for a few months) and backupd wrote absolutely nothing to the logs for that entire time, only when it started and after it was ready to start the actual transfer.

So don't give up if you don't see any evidence in the logs that backupd is doing something. (In Activity Monitor it was consuming 30 to 40 percent of one core all the time, which seemed reasonable.) I very much agree with this: "Golden advice is to let Time Machine finish what it started, even if it takes a very long time."
 

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