Why does Time Machine hang/freeze on "Backing up..."?

Question

Lately, whenever I try to back up Time Machine to one particular external drive, it gets past the "Preparing..." stage (most troubleshooting documents talk about fixing problems with hangs in this stage). The status says "Backing up..." and the subtitle will say "Copying X GB of Y GB..." but it will make no progress even if I leave it overnight.

What's wrong?

Others might just need to delete the inProgress files rather than reinstalling. See Let us know if the question here already has your answer. http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/54216/time-machine-stuck-on-preparing-backup-whenever-returning-from-boot-camp-to-os — bmike, May 04 '13 at 19:01

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 17 '13 at 11:07

2

I couldn't find any information on this issue, so I called Apple. After some digging, they told me that this could result from corruption in the OS X install. They asked me to reinstall OS X, which made me a little nervous, but when it was finished, I did a clean Time Machine backup and all went well.

answered Apr 17 '13 at 11:07

Bill

342

Could you place your backup back or would that ruin everything again? – Rob Apr 17 '13 at 11:33
I'm not sure what you mean – Bill Apr 19 '13 at 14:16

Why does Time Machine hang/freeze on "Backing up..."?

1 Answers1