Q: Time machine backups very, very slow

I've been fighting with backup over wifi since El Capitan on a couple of machines.  This is *definitely* at least a part of the problem I'm having.  After removing menumeters from system preferences, backup is running a LOT faster on my macbook pro. 

I'm doing a backup now, but I'm almost certain that there's a problem with the backups making too many copies of files.  I think it's essentially running a full backup every time instead of incrementals.  We'll see what happens when the current backup actually completes.  THANK YOU for sharing this info.  I'm VERY sad that menumeters has to go.

This has also been bugging me but my backups do complete over wired network.

I've had to do a fresh backup as mac suggested it and this was slow.

I closed all programs and restarted Finder. The backup speed increased greatly. Not sure if the backups are slow due to open files etc.

Hello,

Menumeter was the problem for me too! It was enough to disable "Display Disk Activity Menu Meter" :-)

Thanks man!

In my case the problem was also MenuMeters. Disabling the Disk Activity monitoring part solved the problem immediately. My TimeMachine backups to my Synology are super fast again!

I've had a little bit of luck by excluding my backup drives from Spotlight indexing, not sure if that helps anyone.

I've been a Mac user for 30 years.  I used to trust Time Capsule backups until Mavericks, Yosemite and now El Capitan is just not doing it's job properly.  I have done many installs, backups and restores from Time machine prior to these but somehow when Mavericks came along, that feature is now not working for me.  I've tried the advice on this thread and many threads.  I have 2 time capsules and 2 buffalo NAS units which should give an idea of how highly i treat backing up.  My 2010 MBP has a 2 terabyte HD and a 500gb SSD.  And that i believe is what may have broken time machine.  Now I use SuperDuper to just clone my drives.

Even now, backups are so abysmally slow on Time capsule, I'm not sure why I bother.  My machines are linked via gigabit Ethernet so one would think it should be fast.

Anyway just wanted to get this out.

I tried disabling disk activity in manometers.  It did the trick.  Surprised it took so long to discover this.  Glad backups are working normally again.  Only saw the disk activity menu meter tip very recently

Thanks for the tip regarding menumeter. I would never have guessed without this hint.

This was also the problem for me:

Backup on USB and on Time Capsule. On USB no big deal. But TC was basically unusable (after three weeks, were I was gone and installed menumeters) It tried to back up 32GB and needed many hours for simply start up and even when it started, it needed hours per 100MB.

After removing menumeters it is reasonably fast (nowhere close to USB, but TC was never really that fast..)

So, I am fine now.

Same problem here battling for months with both my iMac and macbook pro after upgrade to El Capitan. I'm using Synology as storage. Tried disabling and/or removing MenuMeter and various other solutions found on internet but to no avail.

What cured was:

Part of the issue is that low priority input/output-operations (I/O) now seems to get throttled heavily. You can check it via Terminal (can be found via Spotlight ⌘Space and entering terminal) then entering at the bash prompt:

 

 

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fs_usage backupd
and look for the THROTTLED entries. If you see them, the backup is throttled.

 

So if you have a ton of files, just the time it takes to do the I/O takes forever, even if the files are small (because it performs a bunch more I/O operations around xattrs etc. than it used to).

 

Go to a Terminal and enter:

 

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sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

 

For me, this sped up Time Machine backup from "calculating estimated time after already backing up 2,6 GB after 6 hours (!!) to doing a complete backup of my Mac Pro drive (489GB) in useful 13 hours.

It's also a good idea to re-enable the throttling after your backup finished successfully with the following command

 

 

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sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=1

Turning off throttling seems to have done the trick for me, as it was painfully slow doing backups on both my Macbook Air and Pros before doing this.

It seemed to have started after the latest update to 10.11.6.

I am also running 10.11.6 on an iMac.  Setting throttling =0 seems to have helped with backup time.  I am going to run a much larger backup on my MacBook Pro next to confirm.

It was suggested that I re-enable throttling after the backup is complete.  My concern is - I don't want to have to turn it off and on for every backup.  This doesn't seem like a workable permanent solution.

Any suggestions on a more permanent solution?  Thank you.

I spoke too soon.  Still having issues with time to backup to Synology NAS using Time Machine on El Capitan.  Ugh.  Very painful.

steve.mccormick2

Your question was answered in the very first reply to this Discussion, nearly a year ago.

John,  So the answer is buy a Time Capsule?

steve.mccormick2 wrote:

 

John,  So the answer is buy a Time Capsule?

Not necessarily. Read the replies from the more experienced participants of this site (of which there are exactly two). There is no need to add to anything already written, especially since they wrote it repeatedly.

"More experienced participants" tend to lose interest in a Discussion when they realize they're wasting their time. The more experienced they are, the faster they come to that realization.

Writing an effective Apple Support Communities question