Snow Leopard to Yosemite (successful clean install) - Time Machine Not Working?

Hi folks,

I'm running on a 15" Late 2010 Macbook Pro 2.66 GHz i7 8 GB Ram. I've been running on snow leopard for a while and thought i'd give Yosemite a shot today.

I made a time machine back up on Snow Leopard, rebooted it and cleared the hard drive to make a clean install with a Yosemite USB Bootloader. Success.

I wanted to make another Time Machine back up wwith Yosemite freshly installed but when I hit back up - it just kept saying "preparing to backup" and never really did anything? Any ideas? And would I be able to use an old Time Machine back up onto my Yosemite OS now? (old time machine for software/data files).

Thanks in advance.

Welcome to the Mac-Forums.

This is a common error and problem when using the same Time Machine drive from a previous version of OS X to backup a newly installed version. This link has hints and ways to solve the "preparing for backup" message that never goes away.