Endless Time Machine backup

[aicul]

Grrr....

Here I am doing a first backup to TC. My iMac has 40Gb of disk occupied.

Certainly this will take time, but as a first backup one would think that this would take as much time as copying 40Gb.

Strangely no, timemachine starts then slows and grinds to a halt (as noted on preference progress bar).

So after 2 days of direct ethernet connection to TC the backup is still not complete.

If I appreciate apple products for their simplicity, they should also work. And here there clearly is an issue.

Note: TC has 800Gb free.

If anyone has had a issue like this, and resolved it, I would welcome his precious advice.

 

[Macman45]

That's way too long. Could be a lot of things, but when my TC starting acting up, I erased it, re-set tht networks, then performed clean backups of both my Imac and my mBA...It's been fine ever since.


Coud be the HDD in the TC, or it could just be misreporting HDD space which is what fixed mine.

 

[aicul]

Wish I could do a clean reset.

But the TC has 7 iMacs connected to it.

I did stop timemachine on other macs, but this did not change the delays.

Wonder if there is a form of soft reset. But clearly a off/on is not sifficient.

 

[Macman45]

Wish I could do a clean reset.

But the TC has 7 iMacs connected to it.

I did stop timemachine on other macs, but this did not change the delays.

Wonder if there is a form of soft reset. But clearly a off/on is not sifficient.

Not really....You could copy the backups to an external hdd, then erase the TC, I think 7 macs is a lot..most I've ever asked of mine is three....I think space corruption is the issue..grab a cheap USB external and copy the .tib. files there, erase then replace them in exactly the same place on the TC...If they were in folders then create the folders etc. Best i can suggest.

 

[aicul]

I'll try that this week and post back my results.

But now I have to go work

Thanks for input

 

[Macman45]

I'll try that this week and post back my results.

But now I have to go work

Thanks for input

Good luck, hope it does the trick for you.

 

[MattInOz]

Check if spotlight is still indexing?
If spotlight has stalled or bugged out while indexing Timemachine can show the same signs as you describe.

 

[Weaselboy]

So after 2 days of direct ethernet connection to TC the backup is still not complete.

You might try to reset ACLs as described in my previous post here. That can fix the issue you are seeing.

 

[aicul]

So I got a new HD and connected it to the TC.

I also run Onyx on my iMac just in case.

Then I set the new disk as backup disk for the iMac, selected only a Users/xxx folder (to do a fast test).

And Still ridiculously slow response times.

I just cannot believe this from 2 apects :

1/ TimeMachine should be fast and I cannot imagine what exotic thinking time machine is doing

2/ TimeMachine cannot just work, and work, and work. Some form of sanity check should be built in to warn the user that backups are not being completed


I'm starting to think that TC/TimeMachine are not reliable backup tools for general use. It is just too simplistic and prone to not doing what it should do.

 

[aicul]

I'm back with this matter of slow TimeMachine backups

My iMac needed the 10.5.7 update that fixes slow TM. Also did a SpotLight re-indexing. I did these and the situation improved dramatically but not completely. (Thxs to those that pointed me this way)

But for odd reasons, if I restart the backup immediately a backup completes, my iMac still finds 2+Gb to store, even if I did absolutely nothing !!

very curious !

 

[Ledgem]

I've had issues similar to yours twice before. In my cases the problem was file system corruption, probably tied to forced shutdowns (after the system became unresponsive). Have you tried running Disk Utility and "verify disk"? If there is a problem then to fix it you'll need to boot off of your installation disk or run Disk Utility from another Mac that can access your current Mac's hard drive via target disk mode.

It's worth a try.