Preparing never seems to stop

I was traveling for a while and didn't have my external backup drive with me. So my machine was not backed up for 40 days. Now that I am home, Time Machine is trying to back up. However, it starts preparing for the backup but never gets around to doing it.
As I type the status message says preparing 14,198 items. The machine has been on nonstop for 3 days and the only change in the status seems to be an increase in the number of items it is preparing. Two days ago is was preparing 13K items.
So what are my options?
Can I just nuke the backups and start over with a fresh full backup? I think that might be easier since I can't imagine any need at this point for going back to old backups.
Is there another option?
Thanks.
-Steve

Steve March wrote:
Can I just nuke the backups and start over with a fresh full backup? I think that might be easier since I can't imagine any need at this point for going back to old backups.
If you are sure you don't need your old backups, you can go ahead and delete them. The easiest way is to use Disk Utility to reformat (erase) the whole volume. It takes only a few seconds.

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Preparing never seems to stop

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