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ATI 2021 won't start backing up

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How long does it take for ATI to start the backup? I've been waiting for over half an hour now and the backup still hasn't started. ATI apparently hangs with the message "preparing data". Is this normal?

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ATI 2021 looks to do a lot more processing and scanning of data before it starts the actual backup actions for the task, so this can be normal and the overall time taken by the backup task should still remain similar.

Steve Smith wrote:

ATI 2021 looks to do a lot more processing and scanning of data before it starts the actual backup actions for the task, so this can be normal and the overall time taken by the backup task should still remain similar.

How long should I wait before thinking there's something wrong? I had to reinstall ATI 2021 after a system crash and now it looks if there is something wrong. 

Difficult to say how long this will take as every system is different, backup sizes are different etc.

How long have your backups been taking previously for the same source & destination options?

Unfortunately, this can be a little like watching paint dry, so the best advice is to go do something else instead of watching for the 'preparing data' message to change to 'backing up'...!

My own backup tasks are scheduled to run when I am not using my PC so I don't see or worry about how long it spends preparing etc and would only be concerned if the backup was still running when I do come to use the PC!

The Activity panel for my daily incremental disk backup shows as below:

For comparison, a weekly disk incremental backup of a different drive:

The windows disk (C) took approximately 10 minutes for about 60GB and the data disk 20 minutes for 90GB. Maybe it has also something to do it's the first backup of a set. I don't know anymore how long it took in the past for a first starting backup.

However I'm also using EaseUS Todo Backup Home Pro and it's much faster in starting a first backup. If there are previous backups it's comparitive with ATI.

Meanwhile is a backup from the data disk done in about 20 minutes with no previous backups, the other are still pending.

Another thing that might count is that the system disk has been reformatted since the previous backups. Data format has remained unchanged.
I also had to adjust the settings of EaseUS for the system disk, but that first backup didn't last longer than usual.

The second data-backup to an external disk is almost done. It seems as if backup to an external disk is taking more time than an internal disk. SSD is faster than to a regular internal HDD.

I hope the system-backups will eventually run after a time. The second data-backup to external disk took mare than an hour to start.

Mine seems to be locked on a status of Queued. Experienced a power outage a few days ago and on boot, everything is working fine except ATI doesn't want to start backing up again. I can stop it and then Backup Now but goes to Queued indefinitely.

I spent all day yesterday trying to find the cause. No solution found.
Leaving PC running all night to no avail. I then reinstalled windows and all apps, which took another day. Hopefully this doesn't happen anymore.
ATI now seems to be working again.
The backups started after a few minutes and are even ready in 5 minutes.
For now the problem seems to be solved.

Sorry that you had to take such a long route to fix this but if the issues are with the OS itself, then doing the Windows reinstall is probably fixing a lot more that ATI startup.