Time Machine gets stuck with Sierra

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

I have a new 6T MyBook and when I try to run a backup with Time Machine, it starts and then gets stuck on Calculating Time. I’ve followed all the instructions for this problem from Apple with no luck.

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2

Hello,

Have you tried using a different drive or the testing the WD Drive on a different Mac?

3

Thanks. I’m working with Apple on this right now so don’t want to interrupt that process but I’ll post whatever I find. At this point they are scratching their heads and we are trying various things with permission repair and reformatting.

4

I have a similar problem. My MacBook Pro backup partially hangs my 2TB passport. I have to force eject and remount the drive to get it fully functional. Did you resolve your issue with Apple?

5

After weeks of sharing logs with Apple they felt the problem was due to some third party program/app I’m using. Rather than doing a clean install and adding things back, one at a time. I ended up buying Carbon Cloner and it’s backing up 4 TB of data.

1 Like
6

It takes a long time to prepare a new Time Machine volume. Only after Time Machine finishes calculating the backup time will it start the backup, you have to wait. You are backing up nearly 1 Tb. How many hours you waited? Also did you check the hard drive that you are backing up using “disk utility”? Are any of your file on that hard drive corrupted? Time Machine will not fix a corrupted Hard Drive or recover damaged files, you need different software for that Also did you instruct Time Machine to use encryption? If you interrupt the process you may need to start from the beginning and reformat the entire drive. Rename the drive and Restart your system in the safe mode and shut down any application that could try to use the new drive and check it with Disk Utility. You also may have to open your time machine preferences and remove all past and present HDDs from the list that Time Machine wants to use. This will not delete any information unless you re-format the drive.
If the hard drive you are trying to back up is failing then you need find that out and stop using that drive until you get the correct software to recover your files.