Mac – Time Machine is Frozen

backuphard drivetime-machine

I am running Mac 10.8.5 on a 2008 MacBook Pro, I have my time machine save to an external hard drive. Recently I have been unable to back up my machine because it gets hung up on 'Preparing Back Up' I have seen it chug away for 5 hours preparing that thing, I'm begging to think that it might be broken. I have gone into the external hard drive, and deleted the .inProgress then tried to Back up, didn't work. I have also tried to delete the old back ups, I say tried because while the delete dialogue comes up, they don't go anywhere. I have had to do this in standard finder view because the Starfield freezes when I try to go into that. So my questions are these, what is wrong with my Time Machine? Can it be fixed? Should I just reformat my external hard drive and restart the Time machine?

EDIT:
The logs for the inProgress files were empty, there is no latest and the last one that worked, from october said:

Time elapsed: 0.144 seconds

Processing preflight info
  Space needed for this backup: 3.54 GB (864605 blocks of size 4096)
  Preserving last snapshot /Volumes/TR/Backups.backupdb/Danny Michaelis’s MacBook Pro (2)/2013-10-13-174902.inProgress/6949$
Finished processing preflight info

Copying items from "Macintosh HD" (mount: '/' fsUUID:A336210F-DE80-3901-A8E1-2146BBCC66F6 eventDBUUID:5D8F456A-237A-477B-B3EC-D$

Error: (-36) SrcErr:NO Copying /Users/lego90511/.appinventor to /Volumes/TR/Backups.backupdb/Danny Michaelis’s MacBook Pro (2)/20$
Error: (-36) SrcErr:NO Copying /Users/lego90511/.DownloadManager to /Volumes/TR/Backups.backupdb/Danny Michaelis’s MacBook Pro (2$
Error: (-36) SrcErr:NO Copying /Users/lego90511/Applications/Portal.app to /Volumes/TR/Backups.backupdb/Danny Michaelis’s MacBook$

Finished copying items for "Macintosh HD" (mount: '/' fsUUID:A336210F-DE80-3901-A8E1-2146BBCC66F6 eventDBUUID: 5D8F456A-237A-477$

Time elapsed: 29 minutes, 10.000 seconds
Copied 3092 items (25.7 MB)
Gathering events since 3981278.
Needs new backup due to change in /usr/discreet/backburner/Network/Servers/0022412EF7D001C6.xml
Some filesystem changes made during the course of the backup may not be accounted for. Still busy after 2 retries.

Backup complete. Total time elapsed: 33 minutes, 4.000 seconds

EDIT: Result when trying to manually delete the .inProgress files.

/Volumes/TR/Backups.backupdb/Danny Michaelis’s MacBook Pro (2) ? sudo rm -rf 2013-12-10-105000.inProgress
rm: 2013-12-10-105000.inProgress/5ADB13D8-B389-41FB-8D03-68664417956E: Operation not permitted
rm: 2013-12-10-105000.inProgress/96A0E2FF-58AC-4E37-8ACA-AA2E8CA64BB7: Operation not permitted
rm: 2013-12-10-105000.inProgress/A77B6AC7-B833-49E2-BA5D-539310D7EFBD: Operation not permitted
rm: 2013-12-10-105000.inProgress/C1D640A9-FC6D-4EF4-A7A1-5436F26B445A: Operation not permitted
rm: 2013-12-10-105000.inProgress/C5CC4A02-9D03-4338-A415-EABA563B7E60: Operation not permitted
rm: 2013-12-10-105000.inProgress/CB5011C8-4C67-42A9-9BE7-0BC8A07C0031: Operation not permitted
rm: 2013-12-10-105000.inProgress/E52CEACD-A8EC-4E8A-B461-7EE00CD4D9AC: Operation not permitted
rm: 2013-12-10-105000.inProgress/E57AD845-3A4F-4625-830A-017D8C02CA42: Operation not permitted
rm: 2013-12-10-105000.inProgress: Operation not permitted

Best Answer

1: Try this before we proceed:

  1. Unplug your Time Machine backup device
  2. Open Disk Utility (Open Finder > Click Go at Top Menu Bar > Utilities > Disk Utility.app)
  3. Click on your main HDD at the left
  4. Click Repair Disk Permissions
  5. Enter an Administrator Username/Password and Click OK
  6. Once complete, plug in your Time Machine backup device and retry

If this doesn't work, then we need to checkout your logs files (instructions below).

2: How to view your Time Machine log files:

Time Machine keeps a log specific to each backup in the root directory of the backup.

To access its logs, do the following:

  1. Open Terminal (Open Finder > Click Go at Top Menu Bar > Utilities > Terminal.app)
  2. Type cd /Volumes/[Time Machine disk name]/Backups.backupdb/[Machine name]/Latest
  3. Type sudo nano .Backup.log to view the log file

Note: To view the "in progress" logs go into inProgress directories via Terminal you can also see the hidden log files if you type 'ls -al'.

Let us know what these log files say and we can better assist you with your issue.

3: Lets check the system log for the Time Machine's backup process.

I'm certain your issue lies with a single or a couple files that are not behaving nicely.

  1. Open Terminal (Open Finder > Click Go at Top Menu Bar > Utilities > Terminal.app)
  2. Type sudo grep backupd /var/log/system.log
  3. Report your results to your original post above
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