Q: Sierra and Time Machine

Well it did in my case too, however, it only solved Time Machine speed to my external USB disk.

The backup speed to my Time Capsule is still VERY slow, despite having switched off Sophos and Spotlight for the Time Capsule disk.

Something else is still not right....

Hi chuckosmund,

You by accident solved my question , see 'in response to jurkuipers' in the discusion I started.

Hope your TM-troubles are over by now.

Best regards,

Jur Kuipers, The Netherlands

disabling spotlight for the AirPort Extreme Drive and disabling Sophos on Access Scans fixed it only partially ... In principally the backup runs but very very slow 10GB in 2 Hours ...  There is definitely something more wrong with the TM behavior of Sierra

Hi Don, I have been having the same issue but I saw that you had fixed yours. Can you help me? I skimmed through the feed and saw all of the actions you took but I am unclear as to what you found that finally worked for you. Where should I start?

Thanks!

OWRC, thanks.  That seems to have resolved the "preparing back up" issue.  Still very slow though.  According to other posts, this maybe par for the course after a large update...

OK.  I disabled the real-time virus protection in AVIRA and went into Spotlight preferences and specifically excluded my USB-connected drive (a 2TB My Passport) that I have used for Time Machine.  It seems to also have resolved the issue.  It seems likely Spotlight was attempting to index the drive - but I am not sure.  Whatever the cause, it seems the workaround has fixed it for now.

Although this is not the place to talk about Beta Versions, my post is about the release version and I hope someone at Apple will read it

I was using the preliminary beta versions of Sierra since the first Beta release (probably early May), and I never had any issue with Time Machine and two Time Capsules connected via cable. Something has changed in the distribution version.

I was using exactly the same configuration that does not work now: Spotlight without any exceptions, Sophos, etc.

Erasing drives might not be such a good idea as some folk, me included, have a time capsule and other family members do their backups on it as well :-)

I now have my SAN and USB external hard disk working in Time Machine. But still no joy on Apples own Time Capsule. How bizarre is that??

arizonadonn wrote:

 

Do you think Apple monitors these forums and makes notes or 'fixes' based on these posts?

No.

Did you read my earlier reply to you?

I have just bought a USB disk to make the backups, and I probably will skip Time Machine altogether. Any idea of what software to use?

I would certainly use Time Machine, it will probably work well with your USB disk.

You can at least give it a try!!

I am already doing TM backups over USB for another - smaller - computer that I use everyday.

Fact is that I am not happy at all with Time Machine.  TM is binary, either it works, or it doesn't.

I was using a Beta of Sierra since four months ago, and TM worked flawlessly, on a two Time Capsule configuration. So, I thought that I cannot have any problem. Well, I was wrong.

One of my Time Capsule disk broke, so, I still had the other one, isn't it?

I bought another Time Capsule, I configured it, I setup Time Machine to work only with the new disk... no way. It became stuck sometimes "preparing BU", sometimes in the middle of a transfer. Transfer speeds dropped from 10-12 mBytes/sec to a hundred kilobytes.

So, I decided that nothing as a fresh start would wipe down all the jumble-mumble of half done backups. So, I disconnected the new Time Capsule, I went back to the other one that should be working, I checked that I was able to access the backup, and I was. But I not entered into Time Machine as such, I only saw that it found a backup on the disk because it was "Preparing backup", so, I stopped the backup, and when there was no backup in progress, I

erased my working disk (!!!!) (yes, I know... that was a bad move, you simply should never delete your working disk to solve problems that you may have with your backup disk),.

So far, so good, I had a new computer. When starting, I selected: start from a Time Machine copy.... and this piece of junk said that it had found two time machine copies (one for my primary computer, the other for the portable I was working with)  but they were unusable!!! (or something like this). Probably the aborted backup corrupted something in the Time Capsule disl

I looked like an *****le.

So, I configured my computer from scratch, the only data lost were old messages that were not stored in the email server, as all the information was also replicated in Dropbox or in iCloud.

But I needed to download and install all the apps, and to enter usernames and passwords for the whole stuff. Total, 30 work-hours lost, but almost no data loss.

But should the same think happen in my other computer, where I have all my music and pictures, I should have lost two year data. (I have a two year old Backup that may work... or not)

To conclude, I am not very happy with Time Machine. Its easiness of use (Fit an Forget) is wonderful when everything goes fine, but really is not usable in case of problems, because there is no tool (at least that I know) able to navigate  and to pick up the files selectively. I need a Backup software that works smoothly in the background, but that provides tools to work with files and directories when not. At least, to recover the root files and not the incremental.

While it depends on how you upgraded, if you upgrade from an older OS, it has to spend a lot of time calculating the system iterations. For me, It took sometime when upgrading and backing up for the first time when new OS is ready. I suggest you to be patient.