time machine

hi. i have been using time machine for some time now with no problems. today, the little clock kept going around saying "Preparing..." for forever until i stopped it. haven't got a backup since. my external is NOT out of space; i still have a good 350GB of free space.

anyone know what the problem might be and/or how to fix it?

thanks

Have you recently added a lot of data to your system?

The Time Machine software may be simply looking over your new data, comparing it to the backups, before it starts backing up, (as it does) and if you've added a lot of new stuff it can take a while. Particularly over wireless.

It is a known issue that TimeMachine seems like " Preparing .... " forever.

I have had it a couple of times and the solution is ..... be patient ... and let TimeMachine do it's work, even if it takes hours.

The more you interupt the process, the longer it will take for TimeMachine to assess what it needs to do to make a backup.

It may help if you exclude your TimeMachine backup from spotlight indexing.

Can you let it run overnight and see what happens in the log file.

Hope this helps a little

Cheers ... McBie

thanks guys ill try your advice.

how do you exclude the spotlight indexing though?