why is time machine backing up soooooo slowly in catalina?

... it was my first catalina back up,

Excerpted from If a Time Machine backup takes longer than you expect:

• If you recently installed new software or upgraded macOS, it might take longer to complete the next backup. After Time Machine finishes backing up your new software, backups should be faster. 



i've always used time machine to back up on an external hard-drive at the beginning of every month.

Is there a reason for waiting so long?

If you don't back up for longer than (I believe) ten days, TM will perform a "deep scan", exhaustively examining every one of its potentially millions of files to determine which ones need to be backed up. That takes a while.

bigstimpycat wrote:

i have a farily new macbook pro & upgraded to catalina when it was available. i've always used time machine to back up on an external hard-drive at the beginning of every month. it never takes too long but this last time it took hours. i've read this is not unique to me but others have also had this problem. any idea why? how to get it done quicker? is apple going to address this & fix it?

macOS Catalina seems plagued with issues— always advised to have more than one backup method whatever you figure out. ref: https://eclecticlight.co/2020/02/17/time-machine-14-diagnosing-and-working-around-slow-backups/

If you would like to get the initial Time Machine backup completed in a timelier manner, you can change the throttle setting by entering the following sysctl command in Terminal, copy and paste:

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

3-2-1 Backup Strategy: three copies of your data, two different methods, and one offsite.

Boot clone https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-10081

How to use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250

Use DiskUtility Restore feature https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/restore-a-disk-dskutl14062/mac

hi

I have the same issue. I have always used Time Machine to back up on a network drive and on a Time Capsule. Never had any issues. With Catalina ... the computer just slows down and becomes very sluggish ... Mail becomes unusable.

I'm running a 2019 MacBook Pro BTO so it is not the machine for sure. Lately I'm getting a preparing backup and it gets stuck there. Also ... I'm getting high temperatures as well as high fan speeds.

Apple ... please do something ... I spend and average of 10 hours a day on the machine and it is really frustrating.

Thanks for this post

bigstimpycat wrote:

thanks, it was my first catalina back up, hopefully from now on it will be quicker.

Ok then, thanks for the chat.