Why is Time Machine not backing up your Mac? What should you do to fix it if Time Machine won’t backup to external drive? From this post on the MiniTool website, you can find multiple reasons and solutions to troubleshoot this issue.
Time Machine Not Backing up
Time Machine is a professional backup utility that comes with macOS. It enables you to run it to automatically back up your PC data including email, apps, music, photos, and documents to an external drive that is connected to a USB, Thunderbolt, or FireWire port. If you lose data, you can easily perform a restoration.
However, sometimes you suffer from some annoying issues when running Time Machine for a backup although this tool is easy to use. According to reports, we collect some common situations, as shown below:
- Time Machine stuck on preparing backup or Time Machine an error occurred while preparing the backup
- Time Machine waiting to complete first backup
- Time Machine won’t backup to external drive
- Time Machine stuck on connecting to backup task
- Time Machine is slow and takes too long to complete
- …
Connectivity issues, disk errors, an old/incompatible macOS version, and more are the possible reasons behind Time Machine not backing up. If you suffer from this problem, take it easy and you can find several workarounds to address it. Now, let’s see them one by one.
How to Troubleshoot Time Machine Not Backing up Your Mac
Do Some Basic Checks
To make sure a successful backup using Time Machine, you should check something:
Make sure your external drive is supported by this backup utility – you should connect it through a USB, Thunderbolt, or FireWire port.
Time Machine cannot back up data to an external drive with the file system – FAT and NTFS. Go to check the file system format.
You can go to the drive in Finder, right-click on it and choose Get Info, and then check the Format section under General. If it is in FAT or NTFS format, go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility, select the external drive, and tap on Erase to format it to a native macOS format like APFS.
Besides, go to check if your external drive has enough disk space to back up files. You can go to Apple Menu > System Settings > General. Then, click Storage > All Volumes.
Delete Backup Task and Retry
If Time Machine stuck on preparing backup happens, you can tap on the x-shaped icon next to the progress indicator to cancel the current backup task and then start a new backup task.
Restart Mac and Try a Backup
If Time Machine won’t backup to your external drive or gets stuck due to some reason, you can try to reboot your Mac. This could help to clear something to fix some malfunctions.
Step 1: Click the Apple menu and tap on Restart.
Step 2: Uncheck Reopen windows when logging back in and then click Restart to confirm the reboot operation.
Repair Backup Drive
If your backup drive has file system errors, you may encounter Time Machine not backing up and you should go to repair the drive.
Step 1: Click Go > Utilities in the Finder and run Disk Utility.
Step 2: Choose the backup drive and click First Aid. Then, tap on Run.
disk-utility-cant-repair-this-disk
Update macOS
Sometimes Time Machine won’t backup due to the old or incompatible version of the operating system. You can go to update macOS to see if this can help.
Step 1: Navigate to System Preferences > Software Update.
Step 2: After a scan, choose Update Now.
Clean up Time Machine and Backup Again
Time Machine can use some extra files to help it work better but when the backup fails repeatedly, some redundant temporary files are accumulated. Deleting these files is a good option to help solve Time Machine not backing up.
Step 1: Move to Finder to find your external hard drive.
Step 2: Find the Backups.backupdb folder, choose all the .inProgress files, and move them to the Trash.
Step 3: Empty the Trash and then back up your Mac again.
Final Words
These are the common fixes to solve Time Machine not backing up. If your backup is stuck on preparing backup or Time Machine won’t backup to your external drive, follow the given instructions to easily get rid of the trouble.
When you are using a Windows PC, you can run the inbuilt tool called Backup and Restore to back up the data or system. If Windows backup is not working, you can run third-party backup software. Besides, if you are looking for an alternative to Time Machine, MiniTool ShadowMaker is a good assistant and you can see this post – Best Alternative to Time Machine for Windows 11/10/8/7 to know details. Want to have a try? Get this free backup tool via the following button.
About The Author
Position: Columnist
Vera is an editor of the MiniTool Team since 2016 who has more than 7 years’ writing experiences in the field of technical articles. Her articles mainly focus on disk & partition management, PC data recovery, video conversion, as well as PC backup & restore, helping users to solve some errors and issues when using their computers. In her spare times, she likes shopping, playing games and reading some articles.