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User profile for user: jhcarr
jhcarr Author
User level: Level 1
15 points

Since I upgraded to Catalina in August, backups take 5 times longer. Should I downgrade to mojave?

Catalina upgrade of mid 2012 15" MBP appears to have made backups, logins, and file deletion super slow (5 times longer). What's wrong? Should I downgrade to mojave?


It all started when there was a failed upgrade to Catalina in August, 2020. The first one had the spinning bike wheel for over 24 hours. Six hours were spent online with Apple support, who proved uncharacteristically stumped.


Eventually, Apple advised wiping the drive and starting over. I did that. Diskutilty says the drive is fine, but I ended up with a redundant small apfs "data-Macintosh HD" partition. I've read this can happen with multiple attempts to install catalina. I renamed the "vestigial" 5 gig one to xdata-HD, and things now mount.


However, since upgrading to Catalina, all routine backups take 5 times longer—not to mention the slowness of logging in (about 20 minutes to open the desktop) and ultra slow file deletion. Should I downgrade to mojave? Before the upgrade, it was running yosemite and while it was running like a machine short on free space, it was backing up and logging in normally. I use 3 drives (different brands, too) for backup, and back-ups are slow with all of them with the machine in question.


Yosemite, its previous OS, had none of these problems, but my institution (I'm a music teacher), insisted I upgrade for security reasons, and the mojave links at apple all said "try again later" for several days.


The machine is a mid-2012 MacBook Pro. The internal hard drive is 1 TB, which has only about 60 gig free. The machine is essentially unused at this time.


Yes, I know that lack of free space affects ALL performance, including Time Machine, but this is unusual. I have been a UNIX sysadmin for 10 years in a previous life, lol, and Mac user since 1985(!). This is weird.


Backing up the machine up the first time took over 5 days and 17 hours. Ok, the first one has to be slow, especially with a terabyte of data. But now, scheduled back-ups run for over an hour on an unused machine. The time machines estimates are off by about 500%.


The machine is unused, and thus not creating or writing a lot of files except logs. The machine is literally just sitting there running with one user logged in, but no browsing, email, nothing. Just running a user session and routine processes, including timemachine.


Rather, because the backups are so slow, I'm wondering if proceeding with going full 64-bit is

worth it. Has anyone seen anything like this?


Has the upgrade to catalina permanently changed firmware own the machine?

I want to get the machine performing normally. I'm wondering if I need to go back to mojave?


TLDR: Catalina upgrade of mid 2012 15" MBP appears to have made backups, logins, and file deletion super slow (5 times longer). What's wrong? Should I downgrade to mojave?


Thanks to anyone who can shed light on this.

MacBook Pro

Posted on Sep 6, 2020 9:00 AM

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User profile for user: steve626
steve626
User level: Level 6
10,217 points

Posted on Sep 6, 2020 9:41 AM

Some thoughts come to mind:


  • Your disk may be failing. It is nearly ten years old. (Yes, Disk Utility says it is ok, but Disk Utility does not report on the physical health the drive, except for a minimal SMART reading).
  • Is this a spinning (mechanical) drive? If so, the combination of the 64-bit environment, APFS (which is very slow with mechanical drives, it is optimized for SSDs, this has been measured and documented in the CCC blog online [Carbon Copy Cloner])), slow mechanical drive, plus only 5% free disk space is could be creating a cycle of constant paging to disk (how much memory do you have installed), which would be very slow due to the slow mechanical drive plus little free space. At least 20% free space is recommended.
  • The reason I suspect your drive could be failing is that logging in, even with slow mechanical drives and little free space, should take no more than 30 seconds or so (several seconds with an SSD).
  • Your "extra" APFS partition is an indicator that your system installation was flawed, which could result in all kinds of problems.


I suggest you run Etrecheck (a free download) and post the results here. There are people who are expert at analyzing the Etrecheck report and may find that something you have installed and is running in the background is slowing your system down.


If I were you, I would obtain a disk evaluator program, like DriveDX, and have it analyze the physical state of your drive. If it is ok, I would also backup (make sure you have two such backups and you have checked that they work and are sound before the next step!) and then erase and reformat the drive and install a bare vanilla Mac OS, nothing else, no files, no migration, etc. Create one administrator user with a different name than any of your accounts. Then test the vanilla drive and system with just this administrator user. If it is ok, I would then use Migration Assistant to migrate over your account(s) and only files, from your backup, but don't bring over any applications nor settings. Then reinstall the applications a few at a time to see if any are causing the slowdown. But you cannot run a computer efficiently with 5% free space. So you need to put some files on an external drive to create 20% free space.


If you are using any antivirus or "cleaning" software, uninstall it and don't re-install.


Last thought -- it might be time for a new computer if you can afford it.

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User profile for user: steve626
steve626
User level: Level 6
10,217 points

Sep 6, 2020 9:41 AM in response to jhcarr

Some thoughts come to mind:


  • Your disk may be failing. It is nearly ten years old. (Yes, Disk Utility says it is ok, but Disk Utility does not report on the physical health the drive, except for a minimal SMART reading).
  • Is this a spinning (mechanical) drive? If so, the combination of the 64-bit environment, APFS (which is very slow with mechanical drives, it is optimized for SSDs, this has been measured and documented in the CCC blog online [Carbon Copy Cloner])), slow mechanical drive, plus only 5% free disk space is could be creating a cycle of constant paging to disk (how much memory do you have installed), which would be very slow due to the slow mechanical drive plus little free space. At least 20% free space is recommended.
  • The reason I suspect your drive could be failing is that logging in, even with slow mechanical drives and little free space, should take no more than 30 seconds or so (several seconds with an SSD).
  • Your "extra" APFS partition is an indicator that your system installation was flawed, which could result in all kinds of problems.


I suggest you run Etrecheck (a free download) and post the results here. There are people who are expert at analyzing the Etrecheck report and may find that something you have installed and is running in the background is slowing your system down.


If I were you, I would obtain a disk evaluator program, like DriveDX, and have it analyze the physical state of your drive. If it is ok, I would also backup (make sure you have two such backups and you have checked that they work and are sound before the next step!) and then erase and reformat the drive and install a bare vanilla Mac OS, nothing else, no files, no migration, etc. Create one administrator user with a different name than any of your accounts. Then test the vanilla drive and system with just this administrator user. If it is ok, I would then use Migration Assistant to migrate over your account(s) and only files, from your backup, but don't bring over any applications nor settings. Then reinstall the applications a few at a time to see if any are causing the slowdown. But you cannot run a computer efficiently with 5% free space. So you need to put some files on an external drive to create 20% free space.


If you are using any antivirus or "cleaning" software, uninstall it and don't re-install.


Last thought -- it might be time for a new computer if you can afford it.

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User profile for user: jhcarr
jhcarr Author
User level: Level 1
15 points

Sep 11, 2020 8:29 AM in response to steve626

Much thanks to those who have responded.


Sorry to take so long to answer. I have 3 backup disks and the machine has now finally written to all of them.

I did the free Etrecheck. The results indicate the HD is failing. Even if that is not the case, the device is in effect

full, and deleting a lot of stuff is not an option at this time.


I am going to replace it with a 2 TB SSD. The computer is basically used for simple academic office work and

keeping way too many videos of student performances. I need the connectivity the mid 2012 machine offers,

at least for now.


Will follow-up if the replacement solves the problems. Thanks again, folks.




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Since I upgraded to Catalina in August, backups take 5 times longer. Should I downgrade to mojave?

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