Mac – How to find exactly what files are included in the last Time Machine backup

This isn't normal, but you have two options:

1. Just wait for all the processing to finish or error out.
2. Help the process along.

In this case, an initial backup can take a long time, but the way to help the process along is to delete the .../whatever.inProgress file. You could also try backing up to a new drive to make sure it's not a problem with the Mac as opposed to a problem with the backup drive or just a lot of changes to reconcile.

See this other answer for details.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/65801/5472

In cases where you run into this repeatedly, you can either try to isolate what folder takes so long to back up. On a first backup, I've tried to exclude the Users folder (or several folders at the base of the boot volume if they have more than 10 GB of data) to make sure that the filseystem is OK and the backup drive is OK. At that point, you will see backups taking a minute or so for each incremental backup. You can then relax the exclusion list and know if it freezes, then you have a problem in a specific folder.

The other way to attack this is run disk utility (or another tool) to repair the directory structure or make a back up using another tool and wipe the drives / restore them from backup.

The answer is yes and the tool I would use for this task is Disk Utility.

You can use the File menu to select New Disk Image from Folder… and choose only the Backups.backupdb folder as the source of the image.

You can start and see how it works, but I wanted to add some commentary as well since you already are seeing difficulties with other utilities explicitly not wanting any part of cloning Time Machine data.

Since this folder contains hard links, if you don't choose a tool that respects hard links, you will end up with individual copies of each file and not the efficient storage that Time Machine uses.

For network use, you might choose a sparse disk image format which will be easier to copy to S3 and not lose the entire file if the transfer aborts in the middle.

If I were you, I'd perhaps pick important backup intervals and only move those to the offsite storage, but networks are fast enough that you could push an entire backup set to the cloud if you didn't mind paying the data transfer costs and waiting for the upload to be written to S3.