Time Machine taking over a WEEK for initial backup

Question

While several applications (Mac the Ripper, VLC, MPEG Streamclip, and QT Player Pro) were working simultaneously on a big chunk of video from a homemade DVD, my screen went dark with a message "You must shut down your computer." Took a couple of restarts to get things looking normal again -- except for Time Machine (running fine for well over a year), which subsequently couldn't complete any more backups.
After several tries to get TM working again and finding it very very slow, I tried to start clean:
a) checked and repaired my HD (used Applejack)
b) erased my external TM partition with Disk Utility
c) ejected external (Seagate 1.5 TB) drive, disconnected it, powered it off for a few minutes, then reconnected and re-powered it
d) deleted /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist
e) opened TM Preferences, re-selected the drive, re-entered the usual exclusions
f) allowed backup to begin after 120-second countdown
I don't know how to start TM much cleaner than that.
The first message was, "No pre-backup thinning needed: 196.95 GB requested (including padding), 976.06 GB available." As expected, correct? Well, that was a week ago! Looking at the console messages, I have seen steady, but abysmally slow progress since 02:10 on 5 December:
Dec 5  23:19:22 Bobs-iMac com.apple.backupd[14385]: Copied 21.2 MB of 164.1 GB, 360 of 1097465 items
Dec 10 01:04:19 Bobs-iMac com.apple.backupd[14385]: Copied 156.6 MB of 164.1 GB, 1245 of 1097465 items
Dec 10 02:10:36 Bobs-iMac com.apple.backupd[14385]: Copied 158.3 MB of 164.1 GB, 1258 of 1097465 items
Dec 10 03:14:37 Bobs-iMac com.apple.backupd[14385]: Copied 161.3 MB of 164.1 GB, 1267 of 1097465 items
Dec 11 13:03:11 Bobs-iMac com.apple.backupd[14385]: Copied 213.7 MB of 164.1 GB, 1542 of 1097465 items
Dec 11 14:03:11 Bobs-iMac com.apple.backupd[14385]: Copied 214.3 MB of 164.1 GB, 1550 of 1097465 items
It's progress, and I keep hoping that suddenly Time Machine will finish with a burst of accomplishment. But at this rate, it will be months before the first backup is completed.
Suggestions welcomed. (Start over? What will be different?)

Answer 1

Robert Leedom wrote:
3b. Verify internal HD. Check. (Used Applejack.)
4. Repair Disk Permissions on HD. Check. (Used Applejack.)
I'm not familiar with Applejack; I assume it uses the same "works" as Disk Utiltiy (the diskutil UNIX command)?
You listed 1-5; I assume you also checked or tried 9-14?
The Time Machine Buddy widget initially was giving me information, but for the last several days (even after uninstalling and reinstalling TMB), it's been blankly saying, "No Time Machine information found." I thought it was reading from the same place that Console gets info. (Is it?)
Mostly; it reads the current system.log and the prior archived & compressed one, system.log.0.bz2.  Sometimes if either is very large and/or corrupted, it will hang or won't show anything.
> You might try installing the "combo" update...
<Gulp!>
I'd feel a lot better about trying that if I had a backup somewhere. As of now, I have NO backups.
It's always a good idea to keep "secondary" backups.  See #27 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions for some suggestions.
Since you don't have TM backups now, if it's large enough, you might be able to partition the TM drive and put a "bootable clone" on a separate partition, until you can get a second HD.
Question: Given that I'm already running 10.6.8, will the system let me try to "combo update" to 10.6.8?
Yes.  The "combo" contains all the changes since 10.6.0, so is fairly likely to replace a damaged component of OSX.