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Is your time machine slow?

M

mikepro

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 3, 2010
465
66
Anyone else experiencing slooow time machine backups after the ML upgrade? My backup to my 2TB Time capsule seems ridiculously slow. Takes forever at preparing backup, then finally determined 18GB needed, and had only backed 3GB after an hour. Last night I backed up over 100GB 10 times faster than this is going.


I have a 2010 15" Macbook pro with Crucial M4 SSD, 2TB latest gen Time Capsule, with full 300 Mbps wifi strength.

Oh well, guess I'll just let it run overnight and hope it improves...
 
SOOOO CRAZY SLOW!!!! Much slower than yours mine has been running and its claims its only backed up 187Kb of 23GB. iStat says more data than that is moving around though it might just not be reporting correctly.
 
I haven't noticed any slowdowns in my TM backups. But I did do a clean install instead of an upgrade install of ML and got rid of a whole bunch of apps and stuff that were never being used. :cool:
 
mikepro said:
Anyone else experiencing slooow time machine backups after the ML upgrade? My backup to my 2TB Time capsule seems ridiculously slow. Takes forever at preparing backup, then finally determined 18GB needed, and had only backed 3GB after an hour. Last night I backed up over 100GB 10 times faster than this is going.


I have a 2010 15" Macbook pro with Crucial M4 SSD, 2TB latest gen Time Capsule, with full 300 Mbps wifi strength.

Oh well, guess I'll just let it run overnight and hope it improves...
Click to expand...

Time Machine is doing a lot more than just backing up files. System files are being changed on the Time Machine.
 
I'm noticing the same. I thought there was a problem with my external hard drive. I only got the HD a month or so ago and backed up Lion (with the all the system files) quite fast. Now I'm backing up ML and it's taking hours and hours and I only have 60 GB total. At once point it was telling me 75 days to back up.

I took off encryption because it ground to a halt, but it's still very very slow compared to Lion.
 
Mine's quite slow as well... I've already done the backup where is updates the system files changed in 10.8, which was OK.

This is just a routine backup and it's done 5KB of 1Gb - hasn't moved in the last 20 minutes. I think I'll just stop it and then start it again.

EDIT: I gave up and formatted my backup disk (not like I'd want to go back to Lion anyway) -- 10 hours now to backup 570gb of crap ... sounds about right.
 
Last edited:
Will, checking on mine this morning and it is in stage "cleaning up". Still taking forever to clean up. I'll see how subsequent backups do.
 
The first backup after the ML install will take longer time than normal, considering the sheer amount of small files that will be verified, edited, moved, added and deleted.

I had 11 GBs to backup after the install (the install having been the only change made since the last backup...), and it took a while... But now, the backups are back to normal speed and size.
 
Quite the reverse for me - set up a new Time Machine after upgrading to ML and it's backed the 1.2GB in around 6 hours; Last time I set it up with newly installed Lion it took nearly twice that.
 
My first backup took ages too. I think it's just Time Machine re-indexing your backed up files, sorting out which system files have changed since the previous backup etc. After completing the first backup (took me about an hour or so) after I installed ML I'm happy to say that Time Machine is working normally again for me.

Cheers, fb0r
 
Mine was slow at first but I assumed it was because Spotlight was trying to index all the changes at the same time. I just let spotlight finish and it ran a TM backup as fast as usual. It did take awhile because it was a lot of files to change but speed wise it was the same as always.
 
Well, mine started last night at 10:58pm and finished this morning at 7:15am, for 18GB of data. :eek:

Had to leave for work, but left computer on, so I'll post how subsequent backups go, which should be much smaller.
 
Wow...

I just upgraded my 27" iMac (mid 2010) to Mountain Lion. The first scheduled Time Machine backup since the upgrade started 12 hours ago and has only backed up 1.30GB of 10.65GB. So 4-5 days total???

The backup disk is on a Mac Mini on the same Gigabit network. My wife's MacBook Pro (still running Lion) backs up very quickly to the same network drive, as the iMac used to when it was running Lion.

I don't see a lot of disk activity on either the iMac or the backup drive, so it doesn't seem like it's indexing, converting files, etc.
 
mikepro said:
Anyone else experiencing slooow time machine backups after the ML upgrade? My backup to my 2TB Time capsule seems ridiculously slow. Takes forever at preparing backup, then finally determined 18GB needed, and had only backed 3GB after an hour. Last night I backed up over 100GB 10 times faster than this is going.


I have a 2010 15" Macbook pro with Crucial M4 SSD, 2TB latest gen Time Capsule, with full 300 Mbps wifi strength.

Oh well, guess I'll just let it run overnight and hope it improves...
Click to expand...

The first backup after installing Mountain Lion was much larger than usual (about 35 gigs ). But it proceeded at the usual speed. Subsequent backups have performed as before, though the icon doesn't spin during the cleanup phase like it used to. Or is that because with Power Nap closing the lid no longer interrupts the backup process, so the activity is no longer of any consequence?
 
I just ran a TM backup. 20 minutes to backup 15 MB of data. My hard drive is one of the hard drives that have 2 USB connections for faster transfer. If one USB 2.0 port transfers at 480 MBit/S, then two would transfer at 960 MBit/S technically. But, seriously? 20 minutes for 15 MB of data? That's almost a horribly slow rate of 1MB per minute.


That's actually 0.75 or 3/4 of a megabyte per minute. Wow, is that slow.
 
It will be slow on the first backup, as so many files were modified during the upgrade. If you still get this kind of slow behavior in the future, it might be a problem. But right now, it might be alright.
 
That didn't help...

jtc2 said:
I just upgraded my 27" iMac (mid 2010) to Mountain Lion. The first scheduled Time Machine backup since the upgrade started 12 hours ago and has only backed up 1.30GB of 10.65GB. So 4-5 days total???

The backup disk is on a Mac Mini on the same Gigabit network. My wife's MacBook Pro (still running Lion) backs up very quickly to the same network drive, as the iMac used to when it was running Lion.

I don't see a lot of disk activity on either the iMac or the backup drive, so it doesn't seem like it's indexing, converting files, etc.
Click to expand...

So I decided to kill the backup and move the existing sparsebundle to a different drive, forcing the iMac to do a full backup from scratch. It has been running for about 9 hours now and has backed up 5.59GB out of 115.88GB. Just 6 days to go...
 
jtc2 said:
So I decided to kill the backup and move the existing sparsebundle to a different drive, forcing the iMac to do a full backup from scratch. It has been running for about 9 hours now and has backed up 5.59GB out of 115.88GB. Just 6 days to go...
Click to expand...

Have you tried simply moving files from your computer to the disk, to rule out a bad connection? It sounds very strange... Unless you have gigabytes of very, very small files, but even then...
 
My first one after the ML update was 36Gb and was perhaps a little slower than normal. The backups since then have been normal size, normal speed.
 
My TM back-up is around 17 GB and is incredibly slow too. It took around 10 minutes to "prepare the back-up" and now has been stuck on 1.8 MB for last 15 minutes. I suppose this first back-up is going to take all day/night.
 
hafr said:
Have you tried simply moving files from your computer to the disk, to rule out a bad connection? It sounds very strange... Unless you have gigabytes of very, very small files, but even then...
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion. With the backup running, I copied a 10GB file from the iMac to the network backup drive, and it took about 4 minutes. The backup has been running for 19 hours and has only backed up 12GB out of 116GB. It still says 6 days to go.

This really feels like a Time Machine bug. I have used it for years and done many backups, and it has never taken anywhere near this long for this amount of data.
 
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