My Passport seems hung up forever on "preparing to backup"

It’s the first time using a new MyPassportUltraForMac to back up my Mac Mini, running Catalina. Time Machine recognized the MyPassport disk, no problem. I chose “Backup Now”. That was about 5 hours ago, and the progress bar is still “preparing to backup”. How long can it take?

Same issue! First time install on Time Machine. Been 24 hours and still “preparing backup”! Is this normal?