Why has my Mac been running fsck_hfs for two days now?

  1. It was probably running from when your Time Machine volume was mounted.
  2. If the volume isn't present anymore, I doubt it.
    • I'm sure you can sudo killall fsck_hfs; it wouldn't hurt anything. (Have you tried restarting?)
  3. It probably is.

Clicking on the Time Machine icon in the menu bar and choose "Skip verification" caused the fsck_hfs process to stop itself. Maybe a bit nicer than kill...