Time Machine backup very slow in Lion

In my own case I am not ejecting the backup disk. I have but since then have recet the indexes and allowed several clean runs". Since 10.7.2 not ejected backup disk atall but ptoblem persists.

Since I upgraded to Lion 10.7.2 on Friday my back ups are really quick and I have yet to have any of those day long indexings so far. Also the backup disk ejects quickly as it did in Snow Leopard.

I've been indexing for the last 72 hours. Doesn't really seem fixed to me. 😐

@DeimosL - do you have a good wireless connection to your hard drive? Are you sure? If you Option/Alt-click your wi-fi icon in the menubar, what does it say your actual speed is?

@dominik - do you know what kind of connection you have to your hard drive? Is it a wireless? Is it Time Capsule, another Mac computer with a hard drive? An Airport Base Station with attached hard drive? How big is your backup disk and how many backups are already on it? How much data are we talking about? If wireless do you know your actual connection speed? (See above) Are you sure your computer is not going to sleep on you while doing the indexing? You have to turn off sleeping until this is done.

FW hard drive , directly connected to the iMac via FW800.

Don't know how much data was backed up, but indexing has been going on since Friday.

iMac is never going to sleep, has been running 24/7 for years.

I posted eariler that I had started a new backup. 4 days later ! it's still going, About 1/3 of the way through!!

18/10/11 5:45:53.824 PM com.apple.backupd: Copied 4.9 GB of 13.7 GB, 112450 of 144391 items

18/10/11 7:20:01.581 PM com.apple.backupd: Copied 4.9 GB of 13.7 GB, 112471 of 144391 items

This is an Ethernet connected disk, as described before. I will doggedly let it finish (assuming that happens before the onset of the next ice age) and see if subsequent backups are faster.

I will, I hope, report back in a few days/weeks/aeons.

Jonathan Payne1 wrote:

@DeimosL - do you have a good wireless connection to your hard drive? Are you sure? If you Option/Alt-click your wi-fi icon in the menubar, what does it say your actual speed is?

(I used to do 802.11? surveys for industrial installations as part of my job) - excellect coverage, rates 200+ for both computer and Time Capsule (cecked throufg AirPort Utility). Basically, sae as with Snow Leopard which worked fine right up to immediately before upgrade to Lion.

There's someting wrong with your network connection or your hard drive. I would give up now, erase the backup you have, perform some tests with your hard drive to see if you can figure out what speed you can copy files to that hard drive. There's something wrong. That's too slow, period.

Or there's something wrong with your computer. How much RAM do you have? How old is the computer? Maybe your computer is swapping while trying to backup or something. I mean - 21 files copied in approximately 2 hours? And you're still at 4.9 GB?

Michael Newbery wrote:

I posted eariler that I had started a new backup. 4 days later ! it's still going, About 1/3 of the way through!!

18/10/11 5:45:53.824 PM com.apple.backupd: Copied 4.9 GB of 13.7 GB, 112450 of 144391 items

18/10/11 7:20:01.581 PM com.apple.backupd: Copied 4.9 GB of 13.7 GB, 112471 of 144391 items

This is an Ethernet connected disk, as described before. I will doggedly let it finish (assuming that happens before the onset of the next ice age) and see if subsequent backups are faster.

I will, I hope, report back in a few days/weeks/aeons.

Jonathan Payne1 wrote:

There's someting wrong with your network connection or your hard drive. I would give up now, erase the backup you have, perform some tests with your hard drive to see if you can figure out what speed you can copy files to that hard drive. There's something wrong. That's too slow, period.

Or there's something wrong with your computer. How much RAM do you have? How old is the computer? Maybe your computer is swapping while trying to backup or something. I mean - 21 files copied in approximately 2 hours? And you're still at 4.9 GB?

No, there's not.

It's a long thread, and while you could go back and see what I've posted before I'll repeat it here.

I've tested the disks (ZFS RAIDZ) and the network connection. I've run disk benchmarks directly on the server and over the network---the limiting factor is the disk interface speed. I can quite happily copy GB files in either direction at high speed. Other family memebers running Snow Leopard get high speed to the server. I used to get good speed running Snow Leopard. There is adequate RAM on my machine. More to the point, there is over 250MB of RAM in 'Free' state and the swap files are not particularly big.

Right now I'm trying to contribute to problem finding by letting 10.7.2 complete a TM backup and see if, as some have reported, it fixes whatever filesystem damage there is and works thereafter. If it does, I'll be happy. If not, thern we have some more information to assist in finding the bug.

Just jumping in again, I've had 4 different Mac's (3 macbook pro's and an iMac) in my house at various times and they all were backing up fine over WiFi / Time Capsule. For the first backup, I connected with a 1GB/S ethernet cable, otherwise only via WiFi.

One thing I forgot to mention was that all of them have also been religiously running "Maintenance" scripts:

============================================

http://mactoids.com/automator-action-maintenance-38/

http://download.cnet.com/Maintenance/3000-18512_4-99454.html

Maintenance 3.8 for Mac OS X includes Repair Permissions, Verify Preference Files, Periodic Cleanup, Update Prebindings, Clear Cache Files, Update Locate Database, Update Whatis Database, Update LaunchServices Database, Rebuild Spotlight Index and Force Empty Trash.

============================================

I'm not sure if these Maintenance actions actually fixed or helped any of my Time Machine issues, but I figured I'd share the info for others to try...

Well, my indexing is done after 6 straight days. Fingers crossed that this is fixed now.

I just installed Lion a few days ago and my Time Machine has been running pretty much constantly. It backs up my data (about 175 GB) and then starts over. With SL, the hourly backups were brief but now it takes hours to do the entire backup over again and again and again ...

I realize there are 24 pages of posts on this thread and I've read through a number of them so my apologies if I've missed the solution to my problem. If there is a solution, could someone please direct me there. My fan never shuts off and that concerns me.

I used to have these problems but Lion fixed it. However, now that I am on 10.7.2 my macbook backs up every 30 to 45 minutes even though I only email and web surfing usually. Sorry for maybe being off topic, but those that get it fixed may see TM fire off quite often.

EarthBased- Time Machine is going to "fire off" once every hour unless you've mucked with it's preferences (not easy to do). If it does it more often than that, something is wrong. If it does it less often than that, again something might be wrong or it just might be taking longer than an hour to complete each backup.

Sadly, 10.7.2 didn't change a thing for me. While my backups are usually quite fast (over LAN only though), right now it's doing a full reindexing again. Looks like it's just going to do that once a week.

Oh and the hourly schedule thing seems to be broken, too. Sometimes, a few minutes after a successful backup, the next one starts right away. I think that happens after waking from sleep, when Time Machine knows it missed a few backups due to sleep, it will start one right away, and then when it's finished, it will do the next one at the original schedule, which might be just a half hour later. Not something that bothers me, just never noticed before.