Mac Self-Help - Help! My TimeMachine is not backing up!

Help! My Time Machine is not backing up!

Time Machine Stuck?

Is Time Machine stuck on "Preparing Backup", really slow, claims it hasn't backed up recently when you're sure it has, or starts to back up and then just stops?

This is an amalgamation of How can I force Time Machine to make a complete... | Official Apple Support Communities, and Speed Up Time Machine by Removing Low Process Priority Throttling and Fix Time Machine When Stuck on “Preparing Backup” in Mac OS X from OS X Daily, combined with experience.

Before You Begin:

You must follow all these steps, although you just have to change the partitions, not necessarily create a new one (I went from two to one partition, and renamed the Time Machine Drive). I also trashed the *.inProgress file, and deleted it after Time Machine started working again.
The problem, found in Console > System Reports, was that backupd was crashing. I don’t know why, but it hasn’t crashed since.
If you have to use Terminal to delete any of the files on the Time Machine disk, there is a problem. The Finder is supposed to be able to empty those files from the Trash; you shouldn’t need the Terminal to do so.

Try This First

Stop Time Machine
Go to the Time Machine disk, open the backups folder belonging to your computer, and delete the “*.inProgress” file.
Restart Time Machine and wait at least an hour before continuing.

(From Fix Time Machine When Stuck on “Preparing Backup” in Mac OS X)

Speed Up Time Machine

Go to Terminal and type sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0 and press enter. This removes throttling of all background processes, so it's not recommended, especially if you're trying to do something else at the same time. To put it back, restart, or type sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=1 into the Terminal and press enter.

(From Speed Up Time Machine by Removing Low Process Priority Throttling)

Repair Your Disk Using Disk Utility

Try it, and then go back to the top of this page and start again.

From How can I force Time Machine to make a complete... | Official Apple Support Communities:

"The progress reporting from Time Machine is so poor, the only way to know if its doing a full backup is to look in the Console - ⌘ space, type 'console'. Once in console, type 'backup' into the filter field

Look for the text 'Forcing deep traversal'...

com.apple.backupd[431]: Forcing deep traversal on source: "Macintosh HD" (device: /dev/disk1 mount: '/' fsUUID: 58A5EE2F-1A7E-3BC7-BBE1-9586F99D131A eventDBUUID: F54D9F07-2C66-4421-8697-97F862DD7A31)

I had tried a number of things which didn't seem to work, then found this tip to prove it was working. It then took 24 hours to backup 73Gb to a local hard disk. These are the steps I took to force a full backup (initial snapshot) to a USB external hard disk:

Opened Time Machine preferences, and switched Time Machine OFF
Initialized local USB hard disk, using 'Disk Utility', selected disk, 'Partition' tab, chose a partition layout of 2 partitions making sure one of the partitions is twice the size of my hard disk with format 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled)'. Click on 'Apply' - it took 20 minutes
Ejected the disk in Finder, then pulled out the USB cable from my Mac.
Deleted file '/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist'
Renamed my Mac: System Preferences>Sharing>Computer Name: 'Mike-MBP'. I think it's important to have a single short word.
Rebooted into Safe mode - hold down shift key whilst rebooting
Rebooted normally
Stood on one leg, put index finger to nose and pointed west.
Plugged in USB cable from hard disk.
OS X Yosemite detected the disk and asked if I'd like Time Machine to use the disk for backups - clicked on 'Use as Backup Disk'
The backup automatically started but completely unconvincingly saying 'Backing up: 350 bytes of 73.08Gb'. I went in to console and there was an entry for 'Forcing deep traversal on source'. [...]

Over the next 24 hours the number slowly increased to 'Backing up: 410.6Mb of 73.08Gb' etc... till it eventually got there.

You can probably miss out a number of steps above, but I wasted so much time on this (Time Machine!) I wanted to be 110% sure Sir Alan."

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