My Time Machine to my AirPort Time Capsule 3TB is too slow.
The backup is converted to APFS.
Anyone has this issue?
The backup is converted to APFS.
Anyone has this issue?
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Time Machine to AirPort Time Capsule via Wi-Fi takes forever
- Thread starter viettanium
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It's painfully slow even over Ethernet. I tend to have to disconnect from Ethernet quicker than the current update gets done, which accumulates even more snapshots to back up, and leaves .interrupted entries into the list of backups. I just can't let a laptop stay docked for 8 hours at a time when I'm mobile.
It's been backing up last week's leftovers of 40 gigs over Ethernet for 14 hours now and it's still only 70% done. Looks like it's going to take the whole weekend. And who knows how much new backlog it has got, once this 40 batch is done. Maybe it's a never-ending backup loop. It sure feels like that.
I'll have to revert to a direct USB3 drive to see if Time Machine becomes viable again. In a NAS setup it no longer is.
Macbook Air / M1 / Big Sur 11.1 RC, before this 11.0.1 (same issue)
I've left feedback to Apple and used Feedback Assistant to write a bug report.
It's slow on two different NAS targets. On both the initial backup is as fast as it ever was, but on both the update speed is about 1-3 GB/hour. The drives check out, and this is a fresh new backup, times two. The same setup worked fine with Catalina / MBP 16".
It's been backing up last week's leftovers of 40 gigs over Ethernet for 14 hours now and it's still only 70% done. Looks like it's going to take the whole weekend. And who knows how much new backlog it has got, once this 40 batch is done. Maybe it's a never-ending backup loop. It sure feels like that.
I'll have to revert to a direct USB3 drive to see if Time Machine becomes viable again. In a NAS setup it no longer is.
Macbook Air / M1 / Big Sur 11.1 RC, before this 11.0.1 (same issue)
I've left feedback to Apple and used Feedback Assistant to write a bug report.
It's slow on two different NAS targets. On both the initial backup is as fast as it ever was, but on both the update speed is about 1-3 GB/hour. The drives check out, and this is a fresh new backup, times two. The same setup worked fine with Catalina / MBP 16".
I have a 2TB capsule connected to my home network (includes AirPort Extreme) I use for wireless backup and it only takes a few minutes for it to complete its task.
So strange that there’s such disparity. I use a Time Capsule, essentially an AirPort Extreme with a disk. With a default APFS setup TM is too slow to keep up with any changes over WiFi. But updating an HFS+ container: it works like it always has, which is slow but fast enough to keep up.
Currently I’m backing up 900 gigs to a directly connected USB3 drive with the default APFS settings. The estimate is almost 5 days. This used to take 12-18 hours.
And it’s misbehaving in other ways too. This is actually supposed to be a small update: I reattached a 2 TB SSD which was already backed up to Time Machine a week ago, with three increments.
But instead of treating this as an incremental update, Time Machine thinks that there’s 900 gigs of all-new material. There’s not. This drive was not attached for a week, it should contain next to no changes.
If this is how it’s going to work, there’s two choices:
A) Keep the SSD attached and enjoy extremely slow updates every time.
B) Attach it every weekend and let it back up 900 gigs all over again for a week.
As they say: pick your poison 🤣
It’s been running for a few hours now. There’s still hope that TM realizes it’s already backed up this drive. Otherwise, see you in a week...
Currently I’m backing up 900 gigs to a directly connected USB3 drive with the default APFS settings. The estimate is almost 5 days. This used to take 12-18 hours.
And it’s misbehaving in other ways too. This is actually supposed to be a small update: I reattached a 2 TB SSD which was already backed up to Time Machine a week ago, with three increments.
But instead of treating this as an incremental update, Time Machine thinks that there’s 900 gigs of all-new material. There’s not. This drive was not attached for a week, it should contain next to no changes.
If this is how it’s going to work, there’s two choices:
A) Keep the SSD attached and enjoy extremely slow updates every time.
B) Attach it every weekend and let it back up 900 gigs all over again for a week.
As they say: pick your poison 🤣
It’s been running for a few hours now. There’s still hope that TM realizes it’s already backed up this drive. Otherwise, see you in a week...
Is the directly connected USB3 APFS formatted drive an SSD, or a spinning disk?
This secondary TM target is a 4 TB spinning disk, a 2.5” WD portable drive. SSDs are still costly/small as a backup target.
9 hours later it’s at 11 percent. It looks like it’s really going to back up the 2 TB SSD again, even though it was already backed up 3 times earlier and then disconnected for a week.
Maybe the deduplication doesn’t look at the whole history, but instead only at the last snapshot, during which the ext SSD source was disconnected. That’d be silly though.
The current estimation is 3 more days and 4 hours for the remaining 840 unchanged gigs. The initial backup took less than a day when I did it a week ago.
To be clear, that’s two issues. Failure to deduplicate, combined with a slow update even while connected directly. Sysctl throttle is set to 0.
The endgame was that I didn't want to wait 3 more days to let TM back up the external drive twice, after it failed to recognize that this drive was already backed up a week ago. It was crawling through the data again, copying everything and wasting space.
Instead I wiped the drive, added a similarly sized, encrypted HFS+ sparsebundle and set that as a backup destination. The downside is that I have to mount it manually, but that's OK.
Result: The initial backup of 1.6 TB took some 15 hours (as with APFS). But an increment of 800 MB took only 4 minutes. Adding one more increment with few or no changes only takes 30 seconds to a minute. That's compared to a minimum of 5 minutes with few or no changes, going up to 3...6 hours if the increment is 10...40 GB in size, when using the default encrypted APFS settings on this same drive.
The same approach is still working on Time Capsule too, allowing fast-enough updates to make it viable over Wifi.
The upside of this solution is that I can easily drag and drop the whole sparsebundle to another disk, if I want to archive it or move it to a faster drive.
This is what I did:
- Wipe the drive as HFS+ with Disk Utility
- Use Disk Utility to create m1-backup.sparsebundle, HFS+, encrypted, sized close to the host drive
- Unmount it
- Mount it again to save the password in the keychain
-
Code:
sudo tmutil setdestination -a /Volumes/m1-backup - All set
Couldn't take it anymore... so I switched my time capsule back to HFS+. Hourly backups are now back to "minutes" vs. "10's of minutes". Don't know what Apple was smoking when the said switching to APFS on time capsule would increase backup speed by 10X... more like decrease 10X!!!
I really wonder that the h*ll TM is doing sometimes... my hourly backups run 6-800Mb even when all I've been doing is browse the web.
Ordered an external SSD to see if TM is truly faster (acceptable) on an APFS formatted USB connected SSD... We shall see...
I really wonder that the h*ll TM is doing sometimes... my hourly backups run 6-800Mb even when all I've been doing is browse the web.
Ordered an external SSD to see if TM is truly faster (acceptable) on an APFS formatted USB connected SSD... We shall see...
You can use BackupLoupe to browse what's taking the space in each increment. The developer is very responsive, he included some of my pet features last year. I bought a license.
By default Time Machine backs up all sorts of logs, caches and diagnostics which aren't needed for restore but do accumulate, even while idle. It's not a big issue if TM is fast enough, since the hourly snapshots get automatically pruned over the weeks and months, but if you want to maximize the space for available history, BackupLoupe is a good way to get there.
The external SSD is work out pretty good. The initial backup of about 230Gb took about an hour. It was actually going much faster for the 1st 50-60, then slowed down as TM usually does for big backups. I also suspect the SSD throttled when it warmed up. Subsequent hourlies are now super fast, a < 1min for 3-400Mb. I've now disabled the back up to time capsule, as I was pretty tired of the 4-5 mins of high cpu every hour when TM ran.
I know an external SSD back up may not be feasible for those that have very large storage requirements, but might be worthwhile investigation. I paid only about $78 for a WD Green 1TB SSD. I'm wondering if it might be feasible to get 2 of those and stick them in 2 bay RAID enclosure which you can get for like $50-60.
I know an external SSD back up may not be feasible for those that have very large storage requirements, but might be worthwhile investigation. I paid only about $78 for a WD Green 1TB SSD. I'm wondering if it might be feasible to get 2 of those and stick them in 2 bay RAID enclosure which you can get for like $50-60.
I use both direct (USB or Thunderbolt) and network storage for different purposes, and although I can tolerate slower performance using Wifi or Ethernet, Apple should just fix Time Machine Backups because currently they are sooo sluggish.