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

Sep 1, 2011 7:16 AM in response to WebSailor

Well sadly Lion is not the answer to this problem because I'm having it and I upgraded to Lion. In fact before the upgrade my backups weren't taking so long but I figured after the upgrade the first one would take a while. Which it did, a few hours. Now the incremental backups are taking forever - or something is - the TC is whirring and grinding away even after the clean up stage is finished, the backup icon remaiins on my desktop and sometimes the process seems to impact on my MacBook because the fan comes on.

I seem to be going from one backup to the next without any downtime. I'll go through the threads, discussions and troubleshooting information but the purpose of the post is to say not to pin your hopes on Lion!