passport for mac stuck on preparing backup

The destination for the backup was a freshly-formatted Samsung 860 EVO 2 TB SSD with a SATA 3.2 interface, which consistently achieves better than 500 MB/s read and write transfer rates when tested using Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. I set Time Machine’s exclude list to ensure that all mounted sources were not backed up, apart from a single folder containing a total of 1.93 GB in just over 10,000 files. Progress then suddenly slows to a crawl, taking an excessively long time to complete, when you have the patience to let it continue.Ī good example is the only successful first backup which I have been able to complete in 10.15.3 on this iMac Pro. When Time Machine is enabled, the first full backup proceeds very briskly until 10-20% of the source has been backed up. Once formatted, each has passed Disk Utility’s First Aid checks without any errors, as have the source volumes used to make these backups. Each is now a standalone SSD, three formatted in APFS and the fourth in HFS+, using Disk Utility in macOS 10.15.3. As I’ll explain in future articles, I have completely re-initialised the four 2 TB SSDs in my ThunderBay 4 (Thunderbolt 3) enclosure. Since then, I have looked at different scenarios and confirmed that this isn’t related to any underlying disk or file system problem, nor is it the result of using SoftRAID.

I have already given considerable detail, including log data, on the problem with making first full backups. I can now confirm that making the first full backup using Time Machine can take so long that it may not be feasible, and that some users are also experiencing failure to restore from an existing backup. If you’re intending to rely on Time Machine backups in macOS 10.15.3, you might want to use an alternative as well.

Passport for mac stuck on preparing backup