10.5: How to abort a stuck Time Machine backup

Jan 07, '09 07:30:02AM

Contributed by: rab777hp

Sometimes you just need to stop that Time Machine backup, whether it's because it's slowing down your computer and you need it to be very fast right then and want to backup later, or because Time Machine is not working (as is happening to me right now).

Sometimes just clicking Stop Backup item in the menu bar or System Preferences panel doesn't work (as is happening to me right now). If that's the case, you can turn to Terminal to stop it immediately. (You can also do this from Activity Monitor, but it takes longer and is trickier).

Once you've opened up Terminal (in Applications » Utilities), you can use the killall command to kill the process backupd, which is the Time Machine process. However, the process backupd is owned by root, so you need to run killall with root permissions via sudo: sudo killall backupd Type in you password when prompted, and Time Machine will instantly stop. This is handy if Time Machine is broken and not working.

[robg adds: I wouldn't recommend using this hint unless Time Machine is really and truly stuck -- killing the process means that it won't get a chance to nicely finish whatever it was trying to do. In some cases, depending on what it's actually doing, you may endanger your backups. With that said, I have had TM get stuck (typically at the "Finishing backup" step) for literally hours, and have eventually resorted to killing the process to get it to stop.]

Comments (9)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090103145307918