why is my passport for mac showing spinning

Why Is My Passport Showing Spinning Free On A
Why Is My Passport Showing Spinning Upgrade My Mac

Still preparing an incremental backup after 10 hours This is absolutely unacceptable.

On some rare occasions though, Time Machine may get stuck on the Preparing Backup stage for an inordinately long amount of time, causing a backup to never start, let alone finish.

Its these failed backup attempts that were looking to remedy here.

Whats not normal is for the Preparing Backup stage to take 12-24 hours, getting stuck in that stage overnight or all day long, for example (unless perhaps you have some truly absurd amount of disk space, then it may take that long and be normal).

Even if the drive has been recently indexed by Spotlight, a reboot still appears to be necessary, whether to resolve whatever issues are occurring with backupd or not.

The easiest way to do this is through the Time Machine menu icon or the System Preferences.

At this point, your Time Machine backup will proceed as expected, so just let it run and youre good to go again.

Admittedly a bit advanced, but those tools show a definitive way to demonstrate this specific issue and resolution.

This has been foxing me for months but its so simple to solve.

Im not techy and wasnt sure about the let spotlight run instructionas spotlight didnt appear to be doing anything (no dot in the spyglass, etc).

Is there anything else I can try Might my oldish external hard drive be the problem Would welcome any help, thanks.

I finally found the reason why: one directory had a lot of files (more than millions, I had to kill the ls command as it was taking too much time).

Once the directory put in the Trash, everything went back to normal.

To find directories which have contained a lot of files at some point, use: find -xdev -type d -size 100k.

I never would have known to look for that if you hadnt mentioned it, and seeing it working in Activity Monitor proved that I just had to be patient.

It was the answer to this exact problem that I didnt find anywhere else.

I followed all prompts and am still stuck at preparing when backing up.

The other three are working perfectly, mine is stuck on preparing backup.

I click on the computer name in order to try to access the backup files but I get resource temporarily unavailable.

Why Is My Passport Showing Spinning Upgrade My Mac

Was planning to upgrade my Mac since I thought it could be a mac issue since my macbook air is over 5 years old.

When you reboot with the Time Machine disk connected and powered up, the Mac will start indexing the disk AND try to do the back up.

Thats when it fails and gets stuck on in.progress The Time Machine disk doesnt need to be indexed, so remove it from spotlight indexing.

I recently upgrade my OS to mac OS Sierra and I believe restarting macbook with Backup drive connected did the trick.

Why Is My Passport Showing Spinning Free On A

The first backup after that took 28 hours I have ensured the TM disk is reindexed (2.4 Tb free on a 3 Tb disk so no space problems) as advised in this thread and removed any Anti Virus software as apparently this interferes with Sierra, but NO improvement.

Why Is My Passport For Mac Showing Spinning