Snapshots "loading"....forever...

[donawalt]

I happened to be in Disk Utility and checked on my external backup 10TB drive. All seems to be working fine with TM backups, but I noticed when I click on the backup drive it just says "Loading..." for the snapshots - it's been an hour! If I click on the Macintosh HD, its snapshots come up instantly. Is this normal or is something wrong?

 

[gilby101]

Loading snapshots is slow on HDD. But not that slow. How many snapshots do you have? They all get mounted. Is your HDD very full and fragmented? Fragmentation will depend on what else is on the drive and how active the file changes are.

 

[donawalt]

It says 9.7TB of 10 TB used. How do I tell how many snapshots I have?

 

[gilby101]

It says 9.7TB of 10 TB used. How do I tell how many snapshots I have?

Ouch. Better to keep it at least 10% free. I get concerned at less than 20%free.

How many snapshots - as Disk Utility tells you (if you wait for it), or in Finder select the TM volume and that will show all the snapshots.

 

[ThrowerGB]

It says 9.7TB of 10 TB used. How do I tell how many snapshots I have?

There was an old rule of thumb (many years ago) that said don't load up hard disk drives more than about 60% or you'll start to see degraded performance. It looks like your TM drive is at 97%. Perhaps that's the problem.
TM works best if it's the only thing using a particular drive.
When a TM drive gets so full, it can't add any new updates, it deletes the oldest instances so it can fit the new ones in. That seems to take a good deal of time. Sometimes when the TM disk is close to full, there's not enough spare space to do the deletions.
The Apple File System (APFS) Wikipedia entry has quite a bit of interesting information. Under the Limitations Heading, It notes: "is much slower on APFS when it is located on a hard disk drive."
In my opinion, I think your TM drive is just too full. It might be time to replace it. When my TM drives get too full, I put them away and buy a new drive. I like to think I'm creating a long term archive that way, but I've never actually tested reattaching any of the old drives.

 

[donawalt]

So, it's been just about 12 hours since I last ran Disk Utility, and clicked on the TM volume to see "Loading..." under APFS Snapshots. I went to Finder, clicked on the TM volume, it was exactly 100 snapshots. I didn't think being 97% full was an issue, and backups are still done very quickly...?!