Time Machine backup very slow in Lion

This is very screwed up.

My TM keeps indexing for hours and hours, often using up 70% or more of the processors, slowing the whole system down.

The only temporary fix is to turn off TM, and then reboot.

Apple, fix this ASAP.

FYI, my TM backup is on a FW connected HD, my backup spans more than 2 years, and was carried over from SL.

I'm having good (normal) performance on my Macbook Air (newest gen, Lion, 128GB SSD), but horrible performance with my new iMac 27 (256GB SSD + 1TB HD). The MBA does hourly incremental backups in usually under a minute (for, say, <20 MB of changes). The iMac, on the other hand, spends about 2 minutes "preparing," then goes to backing up for another minute or two, then goes to "finishing backup" for another minute or two. I just timed an incremental backup of 3.0MB at 5 minutes, 3 seconds. The MBA would accomplish this in less than a minute --- and I'm running the MBA wirelessly whereas the iMac is attached directly to the Time Capsule via Ethernet. I've tried everything including erasing the Time Capsule and doing a clean install of Lion on the iMac with the same results. Also spent a half hour on the phone with tech support with nothing new to try. What's ironic is that the initial backup of about 42GB went smoothly and was complete in less than an hour. It's the incrementals that don't work right.

The only thing unusual about the iMac is it has two drives. I even excluded HD2 from the backup. Hopefully, this is a Lion issue that will be resolved in a future update. I hate having spent $2400 for the iMac only to have this annoying problem.

You call this "horrible Performance"? ;-) My "good performance" with Lion takes about 13 minutes for an incremental backup of < 10 MB. Usually it takes an hour or 90 minutes, though, and that's over GBit LAN right now. That's even when it's not "Waiting for index to be ready". My computer is not doing anything else in the meantime, or I'm doing some easy web surfing.

And once every few days Lion decides it needs to reindex the entire Time Capsule, which takes hours over LAN and days over WLAN.

Thinking of it a little more... I think with Snow Leopard, a small incremental backup over LAN used to take about four or five minutes, and over WIFI about 12 minutes normally. So what you're reporting for your iMac seems to be normal, and in case of your MBA, I'd check if it really does a successful backup! ;-)

Yes, my MBA backups are fine. My prior experience with time machine under Snow Leopard was likewise excellent. Incremental backups would typically take less than a minute. The dual drive iMac is the problem. In fact, as I'm typing, I'm watching it hung up on "preparing backup" again. The gentleman I spoke with at Apple tech support last night concurred that a small, incremental backup should indeed take less than a minute. I sent him the logs and he was going to review and call me back next week. Stay tuned....

RWSapogee wrote:

I'm having good (normal) performance on my Macbook Air (newest gen, Lion, 128GB SSD), but horrible performance with my new iMac 27 (256GB SSD + 1TB HD). The MBA does hourly incremental backups in usually under a minute (for, say, <20 MB of changes).

Same setup as me (iMac 27 with SSD+HD), but my iMac uses 2-8 hours for each incremental backup!

I have to admit my iMac is from 2008 (with a conventional HD) and my Time Capsule might be of the first generation, so that might be the reason why a normal incremental backup used to take about 10 minutes. I guess SSDs are quite a bit faster, and newer Time Capsules might be, too. I don't hope to ever get sub 1 minute performance on my setup, but I'd be happy to get back to 10 minutes instead of 60 or more. It's really bad when you want to get to bed and the computer is still backing up. My latest backup started at 7.40pm, and right now it's 10.25pm and it's still running. It looks like it's reindexing the entire Time Capsule once again (it did that yesterday already, and I let it finish).

And yes I think we all agree it's a Lion issue. I'm sure there will be a fix.

For what it's worth:

No problems for me backing up a 2007 iMac, running Lion 10.7.1, to an external drive via FW800. Very fast.

Terribly slow backup of a late-2008 MBP, running Lion 10.7.1, via Wi-Fi to a 2008 model Time Capsule. Vastly slower than Leopard with the identical setup, somewhat slower than Snow Leopard with the identical setup.

Notes: the MBP is usually out of range of the Time Capsule's built-in Wi-Fi, so I am using an AirPort Express to extend the Time Capsule's Wi-Fi network to another room. Bringing the MBP into the same room as the Time Capsule causes the backup to proceed much faster. So it seems like an AirPort-related Wi-Fi issue. Both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands are enabled, but the MBP (and Apple TV) are only using the 2.4GHz band.

I'll try turning off the 5GHz band, since I'm not using it, just in case it might be causing the slow Time Capsule backups...

Espen Vestre wrote:

my iMac uses 2-8 hours for each incremental backup!

IT FIXED ITSELF BY CRASHING!

On Saturday, there was a power outage at work. This caused a spontanous reboot of my iMac, and now Time Machine is doing fine! Last backup took ~2 minutes + 1 minute for post backup cleanup.

This strengthens a hypothesis that I already had: That the slow backups may be due to errors in the fsevent logs. The crash due to the power outage made the machine re-create all logs:

Aug 27 15:06:08 localhost fseventsd[20]: event logs in /.fseventsd out of sync with volume. destroying old logs. (385347 0 440876)

(and similar messages for the other two disks)

I think someone in this thread already suggested deleting the fsevent logs, and based on my experiences now, this may indeed help. But I'm not sure if it's ok to just delete the logs and reboot, so please be careful.

Now I'm just left with one problem: Time Machine is unable to delete the backup that was in progress at the time of the power outage:

Aug 29 11:35:54 aroma com.apple.backupd[2256]: Error (100005) deleting /Volumes/aromaTM/Backups.backupdb/aroma/2011-08-26-211902.inProgress.

Aug 29 11:35:54 aroma com.apple.backupd[2256]: Error -36 deleting backup: /Volumes/aromaTM/Backups.backupdb/aroma/2011-08-26-211902.inProgress

edit: Newest backup now a couple of minutes ago took only 16 seconds. The error message above was repeated, though.

Espen Vestre wrote:

Aug 29 11:35:54 aroma com.apple.backupd[2256]: Error (100005) deleting /Volumes/aromaTM/Backups.backupdb/aroma/2011-08-26-211902.inProgress.

Aug 29 11:35:54 aroma com.apple.backupd[2256]: Error -36 deleting backup: /Volumes/aromaTM/Backups.backupdb/aroma/2011-08-26-211902.inProgress

This was of course due to a damage to the file system by the power outage, but Disk Utility was able to repair it (a lot of errors corrected!). Time Machine is now using a looong time cleaning up after its most recent backup, and I assume that it's working on deleting this incomplete backup. I'll follow up later.

Espen Vestre wrote:

Time Machine is now using a looong time cleaning up after its most recent backup, and I assume that it's working on deleting this incomplete backup. I'll follow up later.

Follow-up: It managed to delete the incomplete backup, and since then it does hourly backups and needs 30-60 seconds for each incremental backup. 🙂

So at least in my case, the culprit seems to have been a messed-up fsevent log!

Which of the messed-up fsevent log were deleted ?

The on on the Time Machine volume (destination), or the one on the source (the Volume to be backed up) ?

Furthermore, this fsevent log is a weird thing. It shows up like a directory in the terminal:

drwx------ 108 root wheel 3.6K Aug 29 20:36 .fseventsd

However, even if I try sudo cd, I just can't get "into" it:

[reinmund:/Volumes/Macintosh HD] reinmund% sudo cd .fseventsd/

[reinmund:/Volumes/Macintosh HD] reinmund%

Nothing happens. Just cd gives me a Permission denied error:

[reinmund:/Volumes/Macintosh HD] reinmund% cd .fseventsd/

.fseventsd/: Permission denied.

😕

Dominik Reinmund wrote:

Which of the messed-up fsevent log were deleted ?

All three (two internal disks + TM disk). I think that's common if the machine is powered off abruptly.

However, even if I try sudo cd, I just can't get "into" it:

Heh, interesting observation.

You can get into it by becoming root and then cd-ing, though (e.g. "sudo bash" and then cd. Be careful in a root shell!).

In case anyone else is having problems with Time Machine running very slowly on Lion while backing up to a TimeCapsule over Wi-Fi:

Turning off the Time Capsule's 5GHz AirPort network option seems to have helped a lot. Then again, restarting the Time Capsule after changing its settings through AirPort Utility may have helped too.

Still, backing up within range of the Time Capsule's Wi-Fi is vastly faster than backing up through an AirPort Express extending the network. Maybe that's just the nature of Wi-Fi in general. But it does seem like Lion's Time Machine is far slower than SL or Leopard's.

I'm also having Time Machine issues. I have an iMac with a 1Tb hard-drive connected via USB. It worked fine until I upgraded to Lion, then TM was stuck on 'Preparing to back-up'. After reading various posts, I deleted the back-up data (reluctantly) and set up a new back-up. Ten days later, it's still stuck on Indexing. Surely it shouldn't take as long as that?

Any suggestions, please?

Cheers

Phil