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medievalhelpdesk
User level: Level 1 (4 points)

MacBook Air Time Machine backup and Disk Utility First Aid stuck on external drive

I periodically back up my MacBook Air to an external HD (currently a Samsung T7 Shield) using Time Machine. Life's been busy, so it's been three months since I've made a back up. But Time Machine ran all night long and the little progress bar made it only, say, 5% of the way towards the end. I picked "Skip This Backup," intending to try again. I planned to eject the disk, reconnect it (making sure connections were all good), and then run Time Machine again. But Finder wouldn't let me eject it. Not wanting to scramble my HD, I decided to run a Disk Utility First Aid process on the HD before ejecting it..and that process has now been running for nearly 12 hours. Progress bar is toggling back and forth endlessly; words just say "Running First Aid on Samsung..."


HELP! Do I just need to be patient? How many hours do let it run before conceding there's a problem? Do I need to Force Quit something? How do I get out of this w/o scrambling the HD? Thanks!


Posted on Oct 24, 2026 8:30 PM

2 replies

steve626
User level: Level 7 (20,243 points)

Oct 25, 2026 9:57 PM in response to medievalhelpdesk

medievalhelpdesk wrote:
How many hours do let it run before conceding there's a problem? Do I need to Force Quit something? How do I get out of this w/o scrambling the HD? Thanks!

Clearly there is a problem with the drive.


Disk Utility getting hung up on an external drive is typically due to drive failure.


However, check a few things:


  • The drive should be connected directly to the Mac (not through a hub)
  • Try a different cable between the drive and the Mac. I have had cables fail, and the symptoms are sometimes the same as a failed drive.
  • Just yesterday, I was using a USB-A to USB-C adaptor made by Apple to connect an external drive to a Macbook Pro that has only USB-C style ports. The drive mounted inconsistently or sometimes not at all. And Disk Utility would not load whenever that external drive was connected. It turned out that the adaptor was failed, trying a different adaptor worked perfectly and all problems went away.


Don't use a hub until you can verify that the drive has failed (or its cable or adaptor). Because I have also had hubs fail, sometimes just one of its ports or sometimes multiple ports. So the port should also be suspect until the true cause is found.

woodmeister50
User level: Level 7 (21,895 points)

Oct 25, 2026 5:40 AM in response to medievalhelpdesk

medievalhelpdesk wrote:
....
HELP! Do I just need to be patient? How many hours do let it run before conceding there's a problem? Do I need to Force Quit something? How do I get out of this w/o scrambling the HD? Thanks!

I think the damage has already been done by a defective drive.


Be aware that Time Machine backups were basically designed as a method to recover a machine to a state before some failure or transitioning to a new machine. It is not an archiving tool.


Based on that, I would try to reformat the drive. If that fails, then the drive is certainly toast. If it succeeds, then just start a new backup.

Originally posted at discussions.apple.com/thread/256382438