I’m not sure that Time Machine’s going to prove much use to me if it spends longer than a weekend “Preparing backup”. Maybe if I left the machine backing up all week and only used it on weekends? Contemplating nuking the backup and starting from scratch as that way at least it’ll not have to do any comparison with the existing backup.
Meanwhile Spotlight is claiming that it’s 3% done indexing the backup volume and has 49 hours remaining. Sigh. I just added the backup volume to the list of things not to index (Why doesn’t that happen automatically?), and I got an error dialog. But re-opening the Spotlight preference pane shows the volume was added anyway. Now it’s still indexing it, but claims it’s 1% done and only got 3 hours remaining.
I’m thinking it’s time to fire up Superduper.