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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Time Machine? What Gives

TPhishman - Mar 6, 2008 - 11:06 pm

Hello once again,

I had taken some relived comfort with all that I have been reading about Time Machine not working under various circumstances. I bought a WD 500GB My Book Premium Edition, I plugged it in via Firewire 400 and it worked fine for the last two months. The problem now seems to be that while time machine recognizes the drive it will not go beyond the Preparing to back up phase of the process. The only thing I have done is install Mac Cleaner. I have only used this to clean cache files from browsers and history files. I am new to the Mac I love it though I am a little lost when it comes to diagnosing problems. Any help would be very appreciated.
Thanks Russell

eric2006 - Mar 7, 2008 - 10:15 pm

This can happen if Time Machine needs to rebuild it's file "tree". If you've let it run overnight, however, something is wrong.

Time Machine uses Spotlight to find changes in files. Try dragging your hard drive and the backup drive to the "Privacy" tab of Spotlight's preferences (in System Preferences), then out again. This will force Spotlight to re-index.

If all else fails, you can always create a new backup.

Eric

TPhishman - Mar 8, 2008 - 10:30 pm

Thanks for the response. I had already made a new back up, out of frustration. Hopefully it wont happen again though if it does I'll give the reindexing spotlight a try. Thanks R