Time Machine problem

[Highmac]

Backups to TM from the MBP (Snow Leopard, 360GB drive) are made manually (usually monthly) to a USB HDD, but when I set it today, I noticed that it had created three for August 1. This time I watched it and it performed happily until the end when it stuck, showing about 6GB to go. After quite a time it simply started again to check the number of items and spent about five minutes trying to save about 8kb!

I'm guessing a prefs problem but not sure where to start. Any suggestions would be gratefully received as having three of each backup rather diminishes the usefulness of a time machine  

[Paddy]

QUOTE(Highmac @ Aug 30 2015, 11:47 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Backups to TM from the MBP (Snow Leopard, 360GB drive) are made manually (usually monthly) to a USB HDD, but when I set it today, I noticed that it had created three for August 1. This time I watched it and it performed happily until the end when it stuck, showing about 6GB to go. After quite a time it simply started again to check the number of items and spent about five minutes trying to save about 8kb!

I'm guessing a prefs problem but not sure where to start. Any suggestions would be gratefully received as having three of each backup rather diminishes the usefulness of a time machine  

A few options:

http://www.applegazette.com/time-machine/f...machine-backup/

https://www.neilturner.me.uk/2014/08/07/fix...ne-backups.html (and checking the Console log to see if you can see something is a good idea anyway)

If you Google "Time Machine stuck" you'll get a lot more from various forums - not sure which one (if any) will turn out to be useful.

[Highmac]

Thanks Paddy - one of the suggestions was forcing Spotlight to re-index and restarting. Seems to have done the trick