Time Machine takes hours for 650 GB, CCC 15 minutes

Question

Time Machine takes hours for 650 GB, CCC 15 minutes

Hi,

I recently restored my 650 GB internal drive system and content incl. settings from a Time Machine backup onto a new 1 TB Aura Pro SSD in a Macbook Air 2013, Mojave 10.14.6, and restarted my backup routines:

with CCC onto a 1.3 TB partition of a 5 TB HDD
with Time Machine onto a 2 TB partition of another 5 TB HDD.

The problem: Time Machine takes hours and finishes about 2 backups per day. The CCC Backup takes 15 minutes.

Before the restore, Time Machine went fine. I have erased the partition with the old Time Machine backups and started everything new, to no avail. I also swapped the cables and USB ports on the mba. The MBA runs fast with no problems.

Is there something I can do?

thank you

MacBook Air

Posted on Feb 17, 2021 6:06 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

schmunzelmonster Author

Level 1

19 points

Feb 22, 2021 6:34 AM in response to schmunzelmonster

What that was: D7. All Backups are Full Backups http://oldtoad.net/pondini.org/TM/D7.html . What helped was to boot into Recovery (on the internal Aura Pro X2 SSD, APFS-formatted) and reinstall Mojave. Now TM is backing up a reasonable amount for what I had done in between, and not the full 650 GB every time.

Before that, I had also tried to trash the preferences as in A4. Full Reset of Time Machine http://oldtoad.net/pondini.org/TM/A4.html but that didn't do it.

Many thanks to OldToad for keeping Pondini's site up. And to Weaselboy on Macrumors to reference it. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/problem-after-time-machine-restore-mojave-10-14.2233119/

Many thanks Matti anyway for responding. I'm glad I don't have to install Big Sur yet.

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Answer 2

Feb 17, 2021 7:06 AM in response to schmunzelmonster

If that 650 GB was full and CCC was doing the 1st clone, copying it in 15 minutes would be about 700 MB/s which is AFAIK very fast for any HDD. My old HDDs are max 140 MB/s sustained and SATA SSDs are 550 MB/s.

But anyways, I prefer CCC because it can make bootable backups even in Big Sur (with some compromises).

A long time ago I tested Time Machine on my old macMini 2009 and then Time Machine was unpractically slow and I haven't tested it since.

AFAIK Time Machine is faster on APFS with Big Sur.

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Answer 3

Feb 17, 2021 10:41 AM in response to Matti Haveri

sorry Matti, I wasn’t clear enough:

These are just updates of existing backups.. They should not take much longer unless I changed a lot or old backups are cleaned out, but there is still plenty of space.

The SSD is APFS, the backup drives HFS+ extended journaled. That should be fine and has been until recently.

Maybe I should restore from a corruption-checked CCC backup and start from scratch? But I have already erased the TM partition and started anew. Not sure what happens here.

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Answer 4

Feb 17, 2021 10:50 AM in response to schmunzelmonster

sorry schmunzelmonster, I wasn't clear enough:

I meant that APFS Time Machine should be faster than Mac OS Extended Time Machine:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/macos-11-0-big-sur-the-ars-technica-review/9/

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Answer 5

Feb 17, 2021 1:34 PM in response to Matti Haveri

yes APFS is faster for sure but only on an SSD - but as fast as before the restore the backups

should become? Nothing changed, except for the new SSD. I could get an external SSD, if that is what you mean, but the HDD was doing just fine before.

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Answer 6

Feb 19, 2021 5:44 AM in response to schmunzelmonster

It has 2TB to back up 600 GB and is cleaning out old backups with only 2 backups made - Not sure what is going on here. Help on this would be appreciated.

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Time Machine takes hours for 650 GB, CCC 15 minutes

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