[johnny]

So, I have no idea what went wrong but my Time Machine back-up system has stopped working. The last backup date was "Yesterday 5:27 PM" and any attempts at backing up since then (including automatic backups) are never successful. I don't get error messages or anything, it just attempts to backup forever.

When I first noticed it, it was saying "Backing up 0KB" for an eternity. There's no telling how long it said that, but I have a feeling it'd been several hours and that it'd been an automatic backup that had gone wrong.

When I try to instruct a backup, it just says "preparing backup" until I get sick of seeing it.

Also, even when I disconnect my external hard drive, the status icon in the menu bar doesn't fade/change to "Disconnected" like it usually does.

I know it's apparently rare for Macs to get viruses without being a direct target, but my computer started acting funny when I opened up a web page with one of those irritating pop-up ads that you have to click "Okay" to close. I'm just worried that it somehow affected my Time Machine program, though I don't have any idea why.

I've restarted my computer, unplugged my external hard drive, even repaired it using Disk Utility, and the problem remains.