Time Machine backup issues - why so slow?

[philjo]

I have Time Machine backup set up to backup my Mac mini - it is saving it to a synology DS210j (set up as 2 HD mirrored)

The Mac had a message pop up on Friday saying that the TM backup needed to be redone and that it would take several hours to do.
It started but only did a couple of Gig in 5 hours but the DS is generally sitting there idle.
Yesterday I restared it and the backup managed again to do only about 18GB in 13 hours.

So far this morning it has backuped up 514MB out of 225GB in 2 hours.

The synology is plugged in via the router with ethernet cable. it is aminly justsitting there so don't know why it is being so slow - it always backed up quite quickly before Friday.

Anyone got any ideas of what the problem is and how I can get it to back up quicker? I have shut down all other programs on the Mac (& disabled the sophos virus scanner)

Many thanks,

 

[Maui19]

Time Machine is too slow to use on my new MBA. The initial backup was going to take days. I did a search on the Internet and found this was a common problem, particularly since the release of Mountain Lion.

I'm looking elsewhere for my backup needs.

 

[gr8tfly]

Without seeing more data, it's hard to say what might be going on. In my case, it seemed directly related to errors logged which indicated issues accessing items using the sandbox daemon. Check system.log and see if you might be seeing errors after starting a backup.

The solution seemed to be a SafeBoot - which clears certain buffers. Altogether, small file (4493 1.5MB) backups take about 00:01:30 (hms). This is on a direct connect FW800 mirror 1TB s/w RAID.

To startup in SafeBoot, restart or startup, then immediately after the startup tone, press and hold the shift key until after the Apple logo appears. You can expect to see it execute a disk verify, with progress bar, then it will ask for your login credentials.

Running 10.8.2 on sig machine.

Hope this helps.

Btw: my wife has an Original MacBook Air and is doing backups over the wifi network (5GHz 'n' Extreme). The average maintenance/small file back also takes just a couple of minutes. It is running 10.7.8.

 

[philjo]

Thanks for your replies.

I have now downloaded the latest firmware for the synology - the one I had was 12 months old. Will have another go later.
I am running Lion on the Mac by the way. It is connected via ethernet cable through the router.

 

[philjo]

It appears that I had to install the OS 10.7.5 supplemental update to fix a big with TM in 10.7.5
I have installed that and it is now backing up at normal speed, though it is creating a new backup so still 200GB to go.
It has already done 10GB in a few minutes - it took several hours to do 100MB this morning.