Incremental Backups in Time Machine taking forever

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Level 1

14 points

Incremental Backups in Time Machine taking forever

Greetings all,

I have read the various posts about slow initial backups with Time Machine. I, on the other hand, had no such problem. However, now that my initial backup is complete I find it takes quite a long time for Time Machine to do its hourly thing. I mean a LONG time. The machine will sit for minutes at a time doing nothing, then copy a few kilobytes of a reported 239 MB backup. Then when it finally does complete - roughly 30 minutes later - it will sit for 10 or 15 minutes at the "Finishing backup" stage. At this rate Time Machine is running almost constantly - by the time the darnned thing finishes it's almost time to start again. It didn't do this on my G5 quad core with the same amount of data (about 850 GB). Does anyone have any ideas why this might be happening?

Thanks for your help.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.7), Mid 2011 27" iMac i7

Posted on May 30, 2011 8:42 AM

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Answer 1

rkaufmann87

Level 10

148,494 points

May 30, 2011 9:34 AM in response to KingofBelize

Time Machine Troubleshooting

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Answer 2

KingofBelize Author

Level 1

14 points

May 30, 2011 11:44 AM in response to rkaufmann87

Thanks very much for the referral. Actually I had stumbled across that resource right after I posted my question - my apologies for not checking first. Since then I have implemented several suggestions I found there - so far with no positive results. I do have an update to ny predictament however: the backup seems to go through two distinct passes - first it backs up the changed files as expected (still quite slowly), then goes back and backs up another approximately 238 MB of files (again at a snail's pace). Overall time: about 40-45 minutes. Obviously at that rate I can't afford to have Time Machine back up every hour or it would run almost constantly.

Again, thanks for your kind assistance. Eventually I hope to sort this out. Otherwise I'll have to relegate Time Machine to the scrap heap and use something else.

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Answer 3

rkaufmann87

Level 10

148,494 points

May 30, 2011 1:03 PM in response to KingofBelize

By chance is your external HD a Western Digital? If it is I'm almost sure that is your problem. WD external HD's have many problems when connected to Macs. If my guess is correct I'd recommend getting rid of it and buying a higher quality drive such as an OWC Mercury Elite Pro, G-Tech G drive or Lacie Quadra d2.

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Answer 4

KingofBelize Author

Level 1

14 points

May 30, 2011 1:12 PM in response to rkaufmann87

No, in fact my external drive is a LaCie 2TB desktop unit that I have been using with good results on my previous G5 quad-core. Unless I'm getting senile in my old age this problem is new (or at least worse) and has only been happening since I started using my new mid-2011 iMac this Saturday. By the way, the last backup took 48 minutes - almost 20 of which was spent at the "finishing backup" stage - which only left about 12 minutes until the next backup. FYI, I tried TimeMachineEditor, one of the utilities referred to in the Time Machine Troubleshooting article, and the darned thing doesn't work. Grrr....

By the way, continued thanks for your help.

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Answer 5

KingofBelize Author

Level 1

14 points

May 30, 2011 2:52 PM in response to rkaufmann87

By using the Time Machine Buddy widget, I looked at one of my earlier backups, which I had cancelled after about 30 minutes. I noticed that before cancelling the backup had copied 505607 files for a total of only 563 KB!!! That would explain the slowness and why backup hard drive is grinding away with little apparent progress. Any idea where all these files may be??

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Answer 6

rkaufmann87

Level 10

148,494 points

May 30, 2011 3:04 PM in response to KingofBelize

Well you have a good quality drive. A couple of questions....how was the drive being used on the G5, as a storage drive, Time Machine, etc....

If it's still not working OK then I'd recommend restarting over with it by reformatting it (Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and the starting over with Time Machine. TM is pretty reliable for the most part but I've seen it likes freshly formatted HD's.

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Answer 7

KingofBelize Author

Level 1

14 points

May 30, 2011 3:20 PM in response to rkaufmann87

I was using the drive exactly as I am now - as a Time Machine backup. Before I put it in service with the new computer I erased the partition used for backup but I did not reformat it. Perhaps I'll try that next. By the way, I just now used Cocktail to erase all my caches and erase my Spotlight database. As soon as that has been rebuilt I'll try doing a brand now back up with Time Machine. Wish me luck.

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Answer 8

rkaufmann87

Level 10

148,494 points

May 30, 2011 3:45 PM in response to KingofBelize

Good luck! That might work.

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Answer 9

Jun 30, 2011 8:52 AM in response to KingofBelize

I have a similiar problem, and I found another thread with the same problem. All threads have the same hardware platform: iMac 27" mid 2011.

Let me ask, whether your boot drive is SSD or HDD? The other two threads have SSD as the boot drive. Maybe there is an issue with SSD and Time Machine.

Did you solve your problem?

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Answer 10

KingofBelize Author

Level 1

14 points

Jun 30, 2011 5:30 PM in response to TomRadfahrer

No, I finally gave up and stopped using Time Machine altogether. I am booting from a standard HDD - the 2 GB Hitachi that is an option in the new iMacs. It seems that Time Machine thinks there are a large amount of very small files on the disk (by that I mean about 600,000 of them) totalling only about 250 MB and it keeps trying to back them up multiple times during the backup. A disk this large ( 2 TB) can't even have files as small as they would have to be if that were true, so I'm at a loss to understand what's going on here. When Time Machine tries to back these files up it slows way down, and as a result each backup (even incremental ones with no apparent changes) takes over 45 minutes. I like Time Machine but there's no way I can use it under these circumstances, so until I figure out what's going on I'll have to do my backing up the old fashioned way.

By the way, thanks for taking the time to reply to my post. Rest assured if I ever find out what's causing the problem I'll let the rest of the cummunity know about it.

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Answer 11

WebSailor

Level 2

323 points

Jul 14, 2011 7:42 PM in response to TomRadfahrer

I have the same problem and also have an iMac 27" mid 2011 with SSD (as boot drive) and HDD. I have been working through this with the folks at Applecare over the last 2 days and we have been eliminating folders from TM backups to try and resolve where the problem lies, For me it appears to be in the Applications folder and when I re-installed the OS it went away. But then I had to start doing software updates and I did them in blocks. When I updated iTunes, Airport Utility and Canon printer software in one go, the problem seemed to come back and then I did 10.6.8 and Java the next time and the problem is back for sure.

As was said before - ages to do a few KB of data, then several minutes "cleaning up" and about 3 minutes "finishing up" after that.

I need to reinstall the OS from the system disk to get it working again and then be more careful when installing updates after that to really nail it down.

Ongoing to be sure, but confident...

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Answer 12

Jul 15, 2011 8:57 AM in response to KingofBelize

Your Majesty!!

Sounds like your incremental backups are quite fast!

I have a mid 2011 iMac with SSD and 2TB HDD, and Time Machine incremental backups take anything up to 5 hours, sometimes longer. Trivial amounts of data are usually involved, but the log reports very large numbers of files.

One time I completed a Time Machine backup, rebooted and initiated another backup immediately with very few apps running (Console, Activity Monitor), and after several hours, the backup log said it had backed up over 800,000 files but only a very small amount of data.

I have a case open with AppleCare since July 1st. They have a whole lot of logs and other information being analyzed.

You will find others who have the same unresolved problem at - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3144862?start=0&tstart=0

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Answer 13

Jul 19, 2011 8:38 AM in response to KingofBelize

I can confirm that the slowdown is an issue specific to SSD.

When I excluded the SSD (boot) volume and only backed up the 2TB HDD, incremental backups came down to 11 or 12 minutes.

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Answer 14

WebSailor

Level 2

323 points

Jul 19, 2011 10:16 AM in response to John Kitchen

11 or 12 minutes still seems like a long time (every hour) for a mere incremental backup. I am used to a couple of minutes before this problem. (Of course it depends on what all your are changing during the hour.) In my own testing, I went back and restored the OS from the discs supplied with my new 27" iMac. The problem seemed to go away and in particular, the long "cleaning up" and "finishing backup" stages at the end were reduced from about 7 minutes to almost nothing. Then I went to System Updates and brought the machine up to current versions, and the problem was back. This made me think it was one of the updates. So back to restoring the OS from the original discs again but this time it is not so clear if I have the problem or not. Some backups take a long time to finish, others don't. I am pinning some hopes on Lion solving this issue and if not, will continue pursuing my case with Apple.

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Answer 15

WebSailor

Level 2

323 points

Jul 21, 2011 12:38 PM in response to WebSailor

WebSailor wrote:

I am pinning some hopes on Lion solving this issue and if not, will continue pursuing my case with Apple.

For those still following this thread with similar problems, who may have upgraded to Lion, I am hoping to hear your experience now and have started a thread in the Lion area at:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3088396?answerId=15303710022#15303710022

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