Why is my Time Machine backup so slow?

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.

I guess I'm just a bit excited since 5 hour backups have come down to 11 minutes.

But you are right. 11 minutes is crazy.

And when it has to delete an expired backup, the time jumps to 30 minutes.

John Kitchen wrote:

. . .

And when it has to delete an expired backup, the time jumps to 30 minutes.

That part may only be temporary. We've seen a few cases where a reinstall of OSX solved a problem going forward, but the old backups took forever to delete. After 24 hours, there will only be one per day remaining, so only one daily backup was impacted.

Pondini wrote:

Also . . . it looks like many of the spaces have disappeared from the log messages; is that the way they appear, or is it just a problem copying, pasting, or displaying them here?

It's some strange effect of this website. The real thing has the spaces and when pasted they disappear

Very odd; I've not seen that before. What browser are you using?

Using Safari.

I copied the log to Word and reduced the length of the Mac name there, then copied and pasted into the browser.

BTW, I'm running TimeTracker, and it is taking a while. I expected this since I turned SSD backups back on and there is a large (~180 GB) backup in there. I'll let you know when TimeTracker tells me stuff.

WebSailor wrote:

<snip> 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.

This is very interesting. I'll pass this on to my AppleCare rep. He originally suggested it might be a 10.6.8 issue

John Kitchen wrote:

This is very interesting. I'll pass this on to my AppleCare rep. He originally suggested it might be a 10.6.8 issue

But i run an iMac 2007 without SSD and the new iMac with SSD and only the new iMac backup so much files every hour.

I blame it on the SSD not on 10.6.8 with runs on both Macs.

John Kitchen wrote:

I'll pass this on to my AppleCare rep. He originally suggested it might be a 10.6.8 issue

I had the issue with 10.6.7. Installed 10.6.8, same thing.

I still have it "fixed" as backups don't take hours anymore. But still they take more than 10 - 11 minutes, now they are up to 18 - 20 minutes every hour average. Typically backups are less than 3 GB (mostly huge Thunderbird files that get marked as changed by stupid Thunderbird). But still, probably I am also in the 20x longer situation.

Anyway I am happy as it is bearable, hoping that the backups are usable if I need them some day.

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

WebSailor wrote:

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

I updated last night to Lion and after some hour of using the new mac os i check the messages in the console. Backup starting to end takes only 1-2 minutes.

I think it is fixed :-)

Oh moment - i backup to the internal HDD. I will change to soon to the external USB Disk. But i don't expect any surprises.

I downloaded Lion last night and did not instal it, and Snow Leopard's Time Machine is now behaving itself. Trivial backups now take about 20 seconds. The numbers reported by Time Machine still don't make sense, but the time issue has gone away.

Seems that holding a gun to the Snow Leopard's head helps! 👿

😀

I'm joining this conversation very late, but if anybody is still listening, I am having the same problem most of you have had -- but without the SSD. Also running 10.6.8. No Lion yet. Incremental, hourly backups of a drive with about 150 GB on it take about 30 minutes and run the processor hard enough to kick the fans on every time.

A typical log always shows about 160,000 files copied in the first step and about 76,000 in the second step, but very little actual data -- typically tens of megabytes. This can be with the screen saver running for the entire hour -- in other words, nothing on the drive was changed by me.

I've tried all of Pondini's suggestions on his very helpful page of tips. I've reformatted the backup drive, I've run Disk Warrior, which worked at one point, and then the problem recurred.

I can only guess that there's something about the disk structure on my system disk that is very hard for TM to deal with. But what is it?

Anybody have any new suggestions to this thing?

Steve

Thunderbird maybe?

In any case, Lion did solve my problem in both my iMac (with SSD) and MacMini (without SSD, but frankly, I don't remember at this point whether I had the problem here or not).

Light incremental backups take just a couple of minutes now.

I am sure this was a bug of some form that got silently fixed at some point, and probably not at the very first Lion version.

I guess the other fellows got their problem solved as well, as this thread got very quiet (fortunately).

Good luck!