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After the Conversion to Catalina, I tried to backup my Macbook Air to a My Passport external 1TB Hard drive as I have done every month. Time Machine never gets beyond "Preparing Backup" even though I let it try for days.
See if any of the following articles can help:
See if any of the following articles can help:
Nothing in the above articles helped. I searched the internet and after trying several recommendations, I found one that solved the problem. I am not sure why it worked, but what was suggested was to reboot the computer with the "My Passport" external drive plugged in to the USB port. During previous efforts, I always unplugged the external drive before rebooting. After more than 12 hours of Time Machine displaying "preparing backup", Time Machine successfully completed the backup.
I’ve been having the same exact issue with my MBP. I have two external drives hooked up via usb; I’m backing up one external to the other and just using my MBP as the medium. The backup was going absolutely nowhere and stuck on ‘preparing backup’ all night last night. Just before I read this, I had rebooted with both external drives attached and it seems to be making some progress in that the green progress bar has changed to gray. At this point it looks like I need to just leave it alone for 12 hours? This is the first backup I’ve conducted on this machine as well, so perhaps that is a factor.
My backup eventually finished, but there were very few files for some reason... I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that I was backing up a time machine backup located on an external drive, using time machine to do the backing up onto another, separate external drive? =)
Sorry that those articles didn't help, but I'm glad you got it resolved and posted back with the solution that you found.
Time Machine Stuck Preparing Backup
