Q: Time Machine backup very slow in Lion

I agree with everyone that backups are now painfully slower under Lion, for some reason. I have read the posts here and have run disk utility on both my macbookpro hard drive as well as the Time Machine backups volume and everything is fine. I have disconnected my extended network and that didn't make any difference. I let Spotlight finish indexing. And yet,the backup, which it says is less than 200MB takes forever to finish. I have attached a snippet form the console log.

While I watch it backing up, I definitely see a lot more data being transferred than the 200MB. I'm wondering if the sparse data files are coming into play. Perhaps Time Machine is somehow now expanding the sparse datasets and then transferring all that data now, where under Snow Leopard it didn't ahve to do that.

Any other thoughts from anyone on what to try? I haven't deleted all the backups and created a new one yet, but that seems like a drastic measure. I would hope Apple would say something first.

Here is the snippet from my system log, having filtered on backupd. You can see that it took over an hour.

Aug  2 09:31:18 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: Starting standard backup

Aug  2 09:31:19 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: Attempting to mount network destination URL: afp://Daniel%20Wieder@imac._afpovertcp._tcp.local/TM%20Backups%20MacBookPro

Aug  2 09:31:20 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: Mounted network destination at mountpoint: /Volumes/TM Backups MacBookPro-1 using URL: afp://Daniel%20Wieder@imac._afpovertcp._tcp.local/TM%20Backups%20MacBookPro

Aug  2 09:31:55 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN

Aug  2 09:32:03 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: Disk image /Volumes/TM Backups MacBookPro-1/MacbookPro.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups

Aug  2 09:32:04 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb

Aug  2 09:37:17 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: 221.9 MB required (including padding), 265.91 GB available

Aug  2 09:56:31 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: Copied 3386 files (165.2 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.

Aug  2 09:58:26 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: 100.0 MB required (including padding), 265.91 GB available

Aug  2 10:08:08 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: Copied 1394 files (673 KB) from volume Macintosh HD.

Aug  2 10:10:57 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: Starting post-backup thinning

Aug  2 10:34:15 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: Deleted /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/MacbookPro/2011-07-03-200711 (190.9 MB)

Aug  2 10:34:15 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: Post-back up thinning complete: 1 expired backups removed

Aug  2 10:34:16 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: Backup completed successfully.

Aug  2 10:34:16 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: Waiting for Spotlight to finish indexing /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb

Aug  2 10:35:16 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: Waiting for Spotlight to finish indexing /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb

Daniel Wieder wrote:

 

I agree with everyone that backups are now painfully slower under Lion, for some reason.

This thread has gotten unmanageably long; but not everyone is seeing that, and those who are have found a variety of the usual causes, plus in a relative few cases, an indexing problem of some sort that does seem new with Lion, mostly on network backups.

What are you backing-up to?

Aug  2 10:34:16 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: Waiting for Spotlight to finish indexing /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb

Aug  2 10:35:16 MacbookPro com.apple.backupd[914]: Waiting for Spotlight to finish indexing /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb

You do seem to have some variety of an indexing problem.

Start by repairing your backups, per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting. 

If that doesn't help, you might want to try deleting the index, as in my previous post.

I deleted /Volumes/Mac-OS-X -KUGS-C01/Time Machine Backups/.Spotlight-V100".  So looks like I will start over.  Thx

Pondini wrote:

 

Georg Portenkirchner wrote:

 

Verifying and repairing my external backup drive took more than 16 hours.

Just for future reference, there's no point to running the verify; if a problem is found, that all has to be done again by the repair.  Just run repair.

 

Anyhowk glad it's sorted out! 

That's what I did, only ran the repair process to verify and repair the disc. That took so long.

My console seems to have no logs about my Time Machine Backups! Why?

Georg Portenkirchner wrote:

 

My console seems to have no logs about my Time Machine Backups! Why?

In the Search Box, enter: backupd

Not a single entry!

When searching for "backup" there are only some lines that seem to come from the iPhone backup.

Georg Portenkirchner wrote:

 

Not a single entry!

When searching for "backup" there are only some lines that seem to come from the iPhone backup.

Try searching for backupd during a TM backup

Your logs get "rotated" periodically (usually at 12:30 am local time).  If you're looking in a new, current log, and no backups have run yet, you won't find any messages there; they'll be in the previous, archived, logs.

See #A1 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting for a widget that will extract the messages from the current and previous archived log.  If that does't work, see the pink box there --  it shows how to use Console to look at the previous logs.

I followed these instructions. Thanks for posting them and maintaining your great Time Machine FAQ.

I had to eject the Time Machine Backups volume and then remount it (which behan indexing and creating a new .Spotlight-V100 immediately) in order to empty the trash contining the original .Spotlight-V100 folder. Attempting to empty the trash before ejecting resulted in many, many, many reports of "item in use / unable to empty trash".

The first backup, which I performed manually with autobackups still turned off, took a while to index but the rest of the process was fast. But - and this is important I think - the volume did not dismount itself when the process was complete; it remained on my desktop.

I just restarted my iMac and turned autobackups back on. I'll report back here in this subthread with the results of subsequent automatic backups.

First automatic backup took about 18 minutes from mounting of the Time Machine Backups volume to completion. The Time Machine Backups volume did not dismount when the backup process was complete.

Boot volume is 228gb free out of 445gb total. Time Machine Backups has backups going back to April 2010 (so about 16 months worth) and is 526gb free out of 998gb total. About 60mb was backed up during this first "automatic" run following the repair/reindexing/first manual backup.

So... 18 minutes isn't terrible, but it still shouldn't take that long. I don't much care, though, since that happens in the background without bothering me. I would like to see the Time Machine Backups volume dismount when the backup is complete, unless there's a good Lion-y reason for it to not be doing so.

Yesterday I was back to the slow backups and having to manually eject Time Capsule after a few hours. Today my backups are around 4 minutes and it's automatically ejecting. I give up trying to figure it out!

If this is your first Lion backup will take hours, I used a LAN connection over night !

It's not my first Lion backup. I downloaded Lion the day after it came out.  At first the backups were very long and would not eject after. Then I messed around with it a little and they were fast again for a day but yesterday they were slow as before. Now they are super fast. I'm guessing tomorrow they'll be slow again. I use wireless with my Time Capsule.

I have the same issue but have potentally noticed the problem I just dont know how to fix it.

I have followed the instructions and deleted the Spotlight-V100 in the time machine sparsebundle which all works fine I do a back up and again no problem.

It has been working fine backing up ejecting all mundane however when it feels like it 2 hidden files are created on the Backups.backupdb folders which are .spotlight_repair and .spotlight_temp the folder appear to stop the drive from ejecting

this is a copy of my log that is a usb drive connected from the Airport