Big Sur slow copying files

Hi donazipe,

Thanks for coming out through Apple Support Communities for help with your iMac and Big Sur. It's important your computer remains quick and responsive, so we'd love to help!

Since you mentioned that you've removed the main hard drive from Spotlight to prevent indexing, we may recommend adding it back to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac, which would speed up searches and may resolve unexpected behavior.

The following guide has more information to help with rebuilding the Spotlight index. Let us know if this guide helps:

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac

We'd also like to share a great resource with further troubleshooting steps to increase the responsiveness of your Mac:

If your Mac runs slowly

We're here for you if you've got any questions.

Have a great day!

Hi donazipe,

Thanks for the information. As this information you're seeing may not be unexpected behavior, and it may take some time for the Spotlight index to rebuild, you may want to continue to allow the process time to complete and monitor for a significant change.

In the meantime, we can also recommend the steps in the following guide to ensure there is no adware or malware on your computer that may be affecting performance:

Protect your Mac from malware

If you should continue to experience issues, and have completed the steps in the guide provided earlier, reach out to Apple Support directly at that point to investigate further.

Here's a direct link to reach out:

Get Support

Take care!

I've been having the same issue since installing Big Sur. It's painful. I spent almost an hour last night with Apple Support deleting caches, doing disk first aid and more. I have a 2017 iMac Retina 5K, 27-inch 3.8 GHz Quad-Core i5 8GB RAM. I had no issue before installing Big Sur.

I can't drag/drop files at the Finder level without getting spinning wheels and necessitating a Finder relaunch. Adobe CC hangs up constantly even though I've reinstalled. And, now even Keynote just stops working and says it needs help at the Finder level.

This sucks.

I have gone through the various options described in the "If your Mac runs slowly" page of the User Guide. I have also checked hardware — disks, cables, ports, etc. — and have zapped the NVRAM and reset the SMC.

After checking everything (more than once), copying files to external hard drives still takes 2 or 3 times as long as it did under Catalina. For example, copying about 1,000 ARW image files took almost one hour whereas the same procedure on the same hardware used to take about 20 minutes with Catalina.

The important point is that exactly the same hardware performs far more slowly under Big Sur.

I am having the same trouble. A 300MB file might take up to 6 minutes to copy. It's annoying. I just bought a brand new MacBook Pro, and it's hanging up more than my 2014 iMac Pro was. Although, I had not yet done the most recent Big Sur update on that one. But it was running Big Sur. It's quite frustrating to have a brand new computer run slower than my old one. Any fixes out there? BTW - I am not a person who wants to get in there and start messing with the OS to make it function normally. When I try that kind of thing, it usually breaks something else. PLEASE HELP! I appreciate anything anyone can offer. :)

I am experiencing the same problem on a 2021 M1 Macbook Pro. It seems to be related to iCloud.

Were you able to identify a solution?

Thank you.

Thank you. I will try your solution.

To confirm, you created a new user, and then copies the apps and documents, while not touching anything else?

Just looking for clarification.

Thank you!