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Is your time machine slow?
- Thread starter mikepro
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My first backup after the ML install was about 9.5GB, proceeded at the usual speed, took about 25 minutes. I've not noticed any difference.
Backup to NAS or TC? Had used WDC mybooklive and the netatalk program sucked. TM on my TC is working fine now (still on Lion).
Not necessarily. That's the nature of bugs, you just may not have the particular circumstances.
But... there is light at the end of the tunnel for everyone. After being ridiculously slow, the current time machine backups now seem to be running much more reasonable. I still think it takes longer for it to do stuff like find the backup disk, prepare, etc. But, it is much, much closer to the normal speed. Very acceptable.
Interestingly, I upgraded 2 Mac Mini's (early 2010 and late 2011) to Mountain Lion, and the Time Machine backups completed in a reasonable time (similar amount of data being backed up). One difference with the iMac is that it's backing up to a network drive, shared from another Mac, where the Mini's were backing up to local USB or FireWire drives. As I mentioned earlier, I did benchmark writing to the network drive from the iMac, and the amount of data Time Machine is saying will take 6 days to back up could be written to it in less than an hour.
I may kill this backup and plug in a USB drive just to see if it behaves differently. Or, maybe I'll just see if this backup actually finishes by August 2...
I may kill this backup and plug in a USB drive just to see if it behaves differently. Or, maybe I'll just see if this backup actually finishes by August 2...
Insanely slow for my first TM backup after the ML upgrade on my 2012 MBA.
TM claims 16.73 GB to back up, and it's been stuck on "Zero KB of 16.73 GB" for at least 20 minutes. Not sure what the problem is - my backups were very fast and snappy in Lion (did one right before the ML upgrade). I guess I'll leave it on all night...
EDIT: 5 minutes later it's at 473 bytes. Not a good sign :/
TM claims 16.73 GB to back up, and it's been stuck on "Zero KB of 16.73 GB" for at least 20 minutes. Not sure what the problem is - my backups were very fast and snappy in Lion (did one right before the ML upgrade). I guess I'll leave it on all night...
EDIT: 5 minutes later it's at 473 bytes. Not a good sign :/
Mine is slow on the first one. It's writing about 2MB/sec to my USB2 external, normally it's a steady 40MB/sec. Hope this only affects the first ML backup.
I noticed a cosmetic improvement in the preferences. It now knows my external is "1TB" and not "999.7GB"
I noticed a cosmetic improvement in the preferences. It now knows my external is "1TB" and not "999.7GB"
I have this problem backing up to a network drive via tb>gbe connection, but wifi saturates the network interface. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1406813/
So I checked on the backup this morning, and it was telling me there were now 8 days remaining instead of 6, and there were very little signs of disk activity. So I cancelled the backup. I then put my original backup sparsebundle (from before the ML upgrade) on a USB drive and plugged it directly into the iMac. I mounted the sparsebundle, told TM to use it, and kicked off the backup again. Now it is going fast again--I think the speed is comparable to before the ML upgrade. It is on pace to finish the incremental backup (around 11GB of data) in under an hour.
The issue seems to be using TM to backup over a network (wired, in my case) to a drive mounted on another Mac. The other Mac is also running ML. This used to work great with Lion, with no noticeable drop in speed, but it is severely crippled now in ML from what I can see.
Mine is really slow as well. I have an iMac and a MacBook Pro. Both were upgraded from 10.7 to 10.8. The MBP remotely connects to the Time Machine backup connected to my iMac. Since the upgrade, the MBP backup has not completed. It doesn't get past several megabytes. I'm going to delete the MBP backup and start fresh to see if that helps.
UPDATE: Starting over appears to have resolved the issue. The backup is now progressing at a normal speed. This is the initial backup, so we'll see if differentials are equally fast.
UPDATE: Starting over appears to have resolved the issue. The backup is now progressing at a normal speed. This is the initial backup, so we'll see if differentials are equally fast.
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Sorry first time TM user here, I have a backup of my Lion in my external HDD and now that I backup my ML on it as well through TM, will my Lion backup still be there?
You know USB2 is a shared bus, and that it can only handle 480 megabit PER CONTROLLER?
I.e., if both ports are on the same controller (in your mac), you're just going to get 480 mb/sec no matter how many cables you use.
Not sure whether both of your ports would share a controller or not.
According to the "System Information" app, I have two controllers. No, I didn't no about the 480 megabit per controller limit. I always thought it was per port. I guess you learn something new everyday!
I had a few problems with my TM, it was preparing for hours, I found that going into system pref/energy saving, then unticking put hard disks to sleep where possible.
TM didn't hang on the preparing stage and backed everything up as usual. Much faster than on Lion too.
TM didn't hang on the preparing stage and backed everything up as usual. Much faster than on Lion too.
Just out of curiosity, those with the severe slowdowns in TM backups, did you do a proper clean install of ML or did you guys either upgrade-install or clean installed and then restored from an old TM backup?
I only ask because my TM backups, if anything, are noticeably faster than when it was under Lion. But I did a full clean install of ML and put everything back on manually and via iCLoud, not from my old Lion TM backup. Wonder if that's why my TM backups are so fast. It's certainly not my drive, I'm using the same old slow external My Passport HD.
I only ask because my TM backups, if anything, are noticeably faster than when it was under Lion. But I did a full clean install of ML and put everything back on manually and via iCLoud, not from my old Lion TM backup. Wonder if that's why my TM backups are so fast. It's certainly not my drive, I'm using the same old slow external My Passport HD.
I am having this problem as well. 2010 MBP, coming from Snow Leopard straight to Mountain Lion. Backups were snappy before, I time machine backup to two separate hard drives and both were quick. Now after the update I have yet to complete a single backup because it's so slow. I'm actually thinking about trying to delete my previous backups from one of the harddrives and doing a clean 1st time backup and seeing if that actually goes quicker than it trying to backup from a previous snow leopard backup.
Also, there are several discussion threads in the Apple forums about this, so a lot of users are experiencing this. No explanations yet though.
Also, there are several discussion threads in the Apple forums about this, so a lot of users are experiencing this. No explanations yet though.
Yes. Slow to find the TC, sporadic errors "disk image...sparsebundle already in use errors," slow to prepare, and very slow to backup, slow to clean up. Way slower than the normal extended BU time (i.e., in SL), even after adding a lot of new files or updating the OS. Previous BU's aren't seen by TM until you get a new full backup successfully accomplished, then, like magic, they reappear.
Multi bug reports have been submitted, Apple knows it is an OS X 10.8 issue, has even released a covert update (which didn't fix it) and engineering is working on another fix. No, everyone doesn't have the problem, but a substantial number do. If you do get your first BU completed after upgrading to ML, you should be OK and TM should work as before after that.
Be patient, I have a running dialogue going with senior level support and a pipeline to engineering going, so it will get done...soon I hope. Meanwhile, reboot/restart your Mac and TC a few times, disable sleep, and let it run as long as it takes to get the first new backup. Worked for me. It helps if your are wireless to temporarily move the TC close to your Mac. Turn off TM on all other connected devices too. As a temp measure, hardwire it for the initial backup. After success, reconnect/reconfig everything as before.
Multi bug reports have been submitted, Apple knows it is an OS X 10.8 issue, has even released a covert update (which didn't fix it) and engineering is working on another fix. No, everyone doesn't have the problem, but a substantial number do. If you do get your first BU completed after upgrading to ML, you should be OK and TM should work as before after that.
Be patient, I have a running dialogue going with senior level support and a pipeline to engineering going, so it will get done...soon I hope. Meanwhile, reboot/restart your Mac and TC a few times, disable sleep, and let it run as long as it takes to get the first new backup. Worked for me. It helps if your are wireless to temporarily move the TC close to your Mac. Turn off TM on all other connected devices too. As a temp measure, hardwire it for the initial backup. After success, reconnect/reconfig everything as before.
I had TM issues. I fixed it with the nuclear option - told Time Capsule to format the disk with a zero pass, then started over with TM. It was very fast after that. I couldn't even delete the sparsebundle file with Finder - it the delete process would just hang. I don't think there was a problem with the TC itself, so I'm guessing ML can't properly access sparsebundle files created by Lion. Has the code changed for that functionality, perhaps?
Ran Time Machine on my laptop and iMac, iMac was first to be backed up, 75gigs first time and took about 35 min.
The laptop took about 40 minutes, and was 48 gigs, so little difference was noticeable but it got backed up, how long it takes doesn't bother me unless it takes well over 12 hours...I just want my stuff backed up.
The laptop took about 40 minutes, and was 48 gigs, so little difference was noticeable but it got backed up, how long it takes doesn't bother me unless it takes well over 12 hours...I just want my stuff backed up.
Since I have two separate time machine drives, I went ahead and reformatted the first, and did a clean time machine backup and it went through at normal pace (About 5-6 hours for a 184 GB initial backup). This seems to have solved it for me, as now the incremental backups go at a normal pace instead of a snails pace like when I first upgraded to ML. Going to do this with my 2nd drive tonight. Not sure what to suggest for those who only have one drive. I probably would reformat it anyways and just do it that way, and take the risk of the drive failing during the backup ; )
Is it TM per se, or is TM killing your wifi speed?
There seems to be a bug that was introduced for older macs.
When your TM is running, hold down ALT and click on the wifi icon on the menu bar at top right. You should be able to see what the Transmit Rate is for your active wifi connection. A good connection rate is 200+. If you have something like 6 or 13, your wifi speed is being killed by some kind of bug in TM. It may only be affecting older models of Mac. Anyhow, what you can do as a workaround is turn your wifi off and on again. (You can do this even in the middle of a TM backup; don't worry, it's designed to be resilient to dropped connections.)
You should then see that when it re-establishes the connection, the speed will be back up to a sensible rate, and your TM backup should proceed at a proper speed. However, you'll need to do the same thing in an hour's time...
This really is quite a bad bug for Apple to have missed. It wasn't addressed in the first update to Mountain Lion, either.
There seems to be a bug that was introduced for older macs.
When your TM is running, hold down ALT and click on the wifi icon on the menu bar at top right. You should be able to see what the Transmit Rate is for your active wifi connection. A good connection rate is 200+. If you have something like 6 or 13, your wifi speed is being killed by some kind of bug in TM. It may only be affecting older models of Mac. Anyhow, what you can do as a workaround is turn your wifi off and on again. (You can do this even in the middle of a TM backup; don't worry, it's designed to be resilient to dropped connections.)
You should then see that when it re-establishes the connection, the speed will be back up to a sensible rate, and your TM backup should proceed at a proper speed. However, you'll need to do the same thing in an hour's time...
This really is quite a bad bug for Apple to have missed. It wasn't addressed in the first update to Mountain Lion, either.
Interesting info. Mine eventually got back to normal speed after completing the
first backup, so I can't really test this.
Time Machine Problem
Any fix on this? I am doing my Incremental backup and it is doing 17.5MB after 6 hours... Huzzah..
It also said that my latest backup was 3rd Dec 2012 but I never notice until now whether it finish the backup or not. Most of the time, as far as I remember, it's not done yet but I'm telling it to stop and then the next day after, I continue the same.
Thought because I do many things on my MBP and it will keep doing the backup but apparently, only small amount of backup for months.....
Any fix on this? I am doing my Incremental backup and it is doing 17.5MB after 6 hours... Huzzah..
It also said that my latest backup was 3rd Dec 2012 but I never notice until now whether it finish the backup or not. Most of the time, as far as I remember, it's not done yet but I'm telling it to stop and then the next day after, I continue the same.
Thought because I do many things on my MBP and it will keep doing the backup but apparently, only small amount of backup for months.....