Backup problems MacBook Pro to Seagate 1TB external drive

I know there have been issues with this Seagate drive but I bought it nevertheless and followed the Forum recommendations for reformatting to the letter (2 partitions). Whilst I have been able to back up my wife's Macbook pro with no problem, in backing up my own it consistently freezes at 16.97Gb into a 159GB process such that the time to completion in the panel grows from 3 hours to 17 hours! I have gone through the Disk verification and repair procedures but it freezes at exactly the same point. Something seems to be amiss in my Mac Book but what? Any help welcomed.

It does sound like the problem is actually on your boot drive, probably a bad sector. I'd suggest trying to use a clone program like Carbon Copy Cloner and see if you have any luck with that.

Thanks for that. will give it a go.

Hello chas_m. Having looked at the Carbon Copy Cloner website and before I spend $40 on the software can you explain why, if the problem might be a bad sector on my Mac hard drive, why CCC might work when Time Machine did not? Maybe CCC allows you to positively choose what to include in the backup whereas TM requires you to exclude items making it pretty tricky to do a partial backup? As a retired Brit, whilst I don't begrudge spending $40 to sort this out, I don't want to throw money away.

I believe member chas_m was suggesting that you give CCC a try to see if it can backup your data without hanging up at that same bad spot on your hard drive. Also, CCC has a 30 day free trial which means you don't have to spend the $40 unless you decide that you want to keep it.

Thanks chascag and chas_m. Carbon Copy Cleaner worked like a dream. successfully backed up and can relax a little.

Following up on yesterday's success with Carbon Copy Cloner, I am puzzled as to why there are 80,000 files on my Mac Hard disk that did not get cloned to the external drive using CCC. That shows 680K but the Mac HD shows 760K files. As you are supposed to be able to boot off the CCC back up, why would it not copy all the files, especially when I selected "all files" for the backup?