Backups with Time Machine and Carbon Clone Copier take days with external drive

I had this happen with my Western Digital "My Passport" usb drive. Turns out the drive itself is the problem. I can't even view the files if I plug it in a Windows computer. So, I replaced it with a Crucial SSD external USB drive and my CCC backups started working fine again. Extremely fast. If you can still access the drive from another computer just using Finder in macOS, or File Explorer in Windows, you can try to copy the files to yet another external drive to preserve your data on a new drive.

It could be that (1) the backup drive is failing or (2) it was initially formatted with a maintenance app which came on the disk. If so, these apps cause many problems for Macs and should never be used. Also, you can try running Disk Utility to see what it shows. If it shows a problem you may have to run D.U. multiple times until you get an ok result. Finally, you can try reformatting the disk with D.U. and then Time Machine can create a new backup.

reimersth wrote:

Thanks for your answers. I had three backup disks and all of them are very slow now. Two were Time Machine backups and one was Carbon Clone Copier.

Spinner and Rotations Drives ?

I cannot believe that all got physical problems in the moment when I changed my MacBook to newer hardware and macOS.

Regardless of how the Older Drives were attached to the New Computer, the limitations of Spinner Drives will always be way slower than SSD which have No Mechanical Moving Parts inside the drive.

Nevertheless the new USB-C SSD drive is really fast compared to them (I know SSD ;) so I am going to replace them by SSD drives.

Would have been nice to understand the real reason of the problem.