I hit a wall yesterday with my MacBook Pro.
Time Machine is just utterly broken on my MacBook Pro running Yosemite. Just going to use this black MacBook from now on, I think.
— Stephen Hackett (@ismh) August 23, 2015
Why do you lie, liar? http://t.co/hZ4JnNkQb8
— Stephen Hackett (@ismh) August 23, 2015
(My tweeting went downhill from there.)
In short, Time Machine would start, but get stuck after just a few moments. Sometimes, it would stall on Preparing Backup… and other times, it’d get a couple of hundred megabytes done (out of several gigabytes it needed to do) then stop.
I turned tried turning Time Machine off and rebooting, but had no luck. No matter what I did, the backup wouldn’t complete.
I did some Googling, and came across a trick I had forgotten about: nuking the .inProgress file from orbit.
This file lives on the Time Machine drive, and is used a temporary cache as files are copied. Sometimes, it get corrupted, halting any further backups. Here’s how to get rid of it and keep the backups flowing.
