jerrydpi Posted February 20 Share Posted February 20 Before I upgrade to Catalina from Mojave, I want to make a Time Machine Backup to an external Hard Drive. My Drive is called Time Machine Backup, and the Info on it states: 1) The last backup was October 22, 2021. 2) The total capacity of the drive is 999.31 GB. 3) There is 426.51 GB available. When I open the Time Machine icon, I chose Open Time Machine Preference, I chose to backup to the backup drive, but as the attached screenshot shows, even after 15 minutes, I am still getting a Preparing Backup message, and it appears no backup is happening. What am I doing wrong? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jerrydpi Posted February 20 Author Share Posted February 20 Still getting same "Preparing Backup" message 🙂 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Solution jerrydpi Posted February 21 Author Solution Share Posted February 21 Low and behold, I just got back from jogging, and it appears that the backup was successful! Thanks for the help Jerry! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
enossified Posted February 21 Share Posted February 21 (edited) 17 hours ago, jerrydpi said: My Drive is called Time Machine Backup, and the Info on it states: 1) The last backup was October 22, 2021. even after 15 minutes, I am still getting a Preparing Backup message, and it appears no backup is happening. What am I doing wrong? Just in case someone with the same issue comes along and reads this thread: If you wait four months between backups, Time Machine has to go look at four months worth of changes to the disk. That includes all files that have been changed since then, all files created since then, and all files deleted since then. The less time between backups, the shorter the Preparing period is because less has changed. It's just a good idea to do backups more often than every four months. If you leave the backup disk mounted 24/7, Time Machine will make a new backup every hour. If the system disk crashes, there's only one hour of changes that can get lost. Edited February 21 by enossified Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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