Any help would be appreciated...
After specifiying disk size (I've tried several different ones, from 146-350), it begins to "prepare the backup destination" but always freezes. I've made it up to 70% and then it just stops. Soon, it says it will take a day to complete! Any ideas?

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Crawdaddy

EX475 - 3TB Total, 2GB, Upgraded Processor.
Using Super Duper for backup right now.
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15" Unibody MacBook Pro, 2.66GHZ, 4GB.
VMWARE XP SP3 Virtual Machine
1 XP SP3 Laptop

- Turn "Folder Duplication" off if you have turned it on;
- Stop any services, which can heavily consume HDD time (Media Collector, Media Streamer, etc.)
- For the beginning try to create as small disk as possilble - 1G - just to make sure that it works, then increase the size to 10G, 100G, etc.

BTW, which version of Mac software do you have? Which version of MSS software? How many HDDs have you installed in MSS? How many free space do you have entirely (and by drive if you have several)?

I will try doing that, thanks! I was able to successfully complete a SuperDuper image backup to a shared folder last night, so I'm not sure what's up with Time Machine. I have the latest version of all software, including the two new mac add-ins for the 7## series. I have 3 hard drives installed, 1.82 TB, with over 650 GB free, which of course includes the 90 GB backup file. I'm just duplicating my 180 GB of music, as that's my life! Can't seem to remember how to get disk space used by drive through the console...

_________________
Crawdaddy

EX475 - 3TB Total, 2GB, Upgraded Processor.
Using Super Duper for backup right now.
_________________________
15" Unibody MacBook Pro, 2.66GHZ, 4GB.
VMWARE XP SP3 Virtual Machine
1 XP SP3 Laptop

Also, pay attention on the logs in the Console.app, especially those ones posted with hp* services. If you've stuck on the "preparation... " phase, it means that the backup image has been created successfully, however something does not allow to finish initialization (or something) of that image. So just try to figure out what's going on the server itself during this process (might be some other plug-ins, etc.) and deactivate everything not related.

Good luck.

Not sure if this helps but, I had a similar problem the very first time I set-up Time Machine on my 2.5 update. It quit midstream and then gave some weird errors after that. I ended up RDC'ing into my WHS and going into my Mac shared folder, deleting the backup file in there and started over. I am not sure what this helped but it worked for me a while ago.

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Marc

EX475 - 5.5 TB Total - 3.5TB MSS w Rosewill RSV-S5(2TB Backup Pool)- LE-1640 (AMD X2 BE-2350 unstable) - 2GB Ram
2.5 Unofficial Software Update/Time Machine Backup
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24" iMac, 2 MacBook Pros
2 Apple TV's

Just curious... Mac Control Center 2.5 does allow to delete backup image itself. Did you try that? Didn't that help then?