Q: What to do if your giant Time Capsule initial Time Machine backup is extremely slow
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May 3, 2016 3:50 PMby John Galt,If I understand correctly, you have two external USB hard disk drives that you want to use in a "rotating" configuration, keeping one offsite, which happens to be an excellent idea.
One of them finished a complete initial TM backup in several hours, which is about right for 2 TB or so. The other one appears to have stalled and you're wondering if it will ever finish.
If all that is correct, do you have reason to believe something is wrong with second hard disk? That would seem to be the most plausible explanation. The other explanation is that you're not looking at the backup to the USB hard disk; you're looking at the backup to the Time Capsule (or a disk connected to it). That backup could take days for 2 TB.
You can check the progress, or lack thereof, by using Console - it's in your Mac's Utilities folder. Find system.log in the sidebar and select it. In the Filter field at the above right, type the word backupd. That will exclude all log entries other than those related to Time Machine. A log entry will be made every so often.
Copy and paste those entries in a reply if you wish. Please omit or obscure any information you may consider personal, such as your iMac's name.
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May 3, 2016 4:15 PMby mvgossman,No actually the first backup to the USB drive went quickly to 80 GB then 10 GB every 24 hours so at around 100 at the 3 day point and then it took off at a very healthy steady rate for the last 1.9 TB so I suspect that all the reports of very slow backups are true but that the extremely large ones take a while to get going, patience is required, extrapolating at 10 GB per day and projecting weeks are inaccurate.
Both drives probably did the same thing, the difference was the first one stalled to a snail's pace at 80 GB after a day, I left it unattended for 4 days and it was done. The second drive (yes, rotating with the first) did the same thing, stalled at 80 GB and then 10 GB per day then the third day it took off at a greatly accelerated rate and was done at 4 days.
Incremental backups are quite fast.
Looks like the third backup, to the Time Capsule, is going faster, perhaps because the ethernet connection is inherently faster than the USB-3, or maybe the Time Machine logic benefits from the prior backup when doing another.
Why three backups?
1. Machine itself is one copy.
2. Time capsule is what I regard as the "main backup" because it's always on and physically separated.
3. Second backup is the first USB external drive because IMHO one backup isn't enough - when the main disk or the backup fails you are vulnerable to another failure wiping you out not to mention the possibility of commonality of failure such as power surges (I do have a surge protector/USB though), which leads to...
4. Third backup to another USB external drive for offsite storage, this is new... planning on monthly incrementals. This backup is obviously insurance against fire, flood, surges, etc. No good for nuclear attack - they are a few miles apart.
5. And Flickr for the irreplaceable photos, a nice backup too, and for the other benefits.
I've lost 3 hard disks in my lifetime.
Mitch
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May 3, 2016 4:44 PMby John Galt,All that sounds perfectly normal to me. The time estimates can be wildly inaccurate, and yes attempting to extrapolate the time to predict when it will finish is impossible. It's a product of way too many variables, including watching its progress. That has been known to affect its speed. Yes I'm joking.
Three backups are far from extreme. "Two is one and one is none."
