Q: Time Machine backup very slow in Lion

Hi Jonathan. You are right, I expected to be able to search the backup for a file (or contact) I've deleted, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be how it works. Instead, you have to manually select a backup, and *then* you can search for the file or contact within that backup. That's not terribly useful, though, unless you forgot where that file was stored.

And that DiskStore message is the same one I regularly get.

Apart from that, Lion has been a great update for me. It definitely feels faster than Snow Leopard, or at least it doesn't feel slower at all. Which is great since my machine is already 3 years old. I can now keep it for another 2-3 years until the next OS comes out.

Yowsa! Today for no apparent reason Time Machine decided that 128k of my files needed copying over.

12/09/2011 21:45:36.387 com.apple.backupd: Copied 128279 files (34.6 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.

What the heck!? Very frustrating. Looking forward to a fix any day now ...

Just got my first Mac (iMac) and have tried to get TM to work as it seems useful and simple.  But I can't get it to complete a backup.  I have 1.4TB on the internal HDD (lots of video and photos).  So far, it has been unable to complete an initial backup.  It hangs up at 258GB or 79GB or something else less than the full backup.  At least it isn't stuck on indexing.  I do a complete TM reset between attempts.  I am backing up to a 3GB external HDD via firewire.

For now, TM is off and ChronoSync and BackBlaze are handling the backup duties.  Will keep watching this thread to see if we find a solution for TM.

Tom

Espen Vestre wrote:

 

Jonathan Payne1 wrote:

 

Anyway, we'll know more about whether Lion is crap if/when they fix this problem. If everything is slow and bloated after Time Machine/Spotlight is fixed,

 

My Lion machine is fine and runs TM lightning fast after fseventsd was re-created. Did any of you who still have problems try to delete your fseventsd directories? (I just accidently got mine re-created because of a power outage)

Can you be more explicit as to how to go about deleting the fseventsd directories? Is that on your Mac or a folder on the TIme Machine hard drive? And do yo need to reboot your computer and/or your Time Machine afterwards?  I don't want to have to resort to the "wait for a crash" method. 

Yes, please!

Looking for a simple advice bow to restore this directory.

But is anyone from Apple reading this?????? Can all of us, who are suffering, look forward to actions? I hope Apple has not launched a product which will bet like a MS Vista!

Seriously, you're all worried about slow backups. But it's not even reliable, I started with a fresh Time Machine volume for Lion just to be safe. Now after a few weeks I get the message that Time Machine has found inconsistencies in my backup and wants to take a fresh start again. Such backups are useless, especially since this comes out of nowhere. This should never ever happen, that backed up data gets declared faulty after a few weeks.

I mostly agree with you. But I wonder what setup you are using. But first, the reason I don't entirely disagree with you is that a backup is only necessary if your main computer hard drive fails. So while it's nice to have a snapshot of your hard drive going all the way back to 2008 (for example) it's not necessary to have all that data, really.

But yeah, it ***** when it fails. I assume you are either using a Time Capsule or a hard drive attached to your Airport Base Station Extreme - please let me know if this is not the case. I used to use hard drive => Airport, something that was never supported, and I routinely ran into the problems you described. The issue is that the airport base station cannot reliably keep the USB attached hard drive properly connected. The hard drive just disappears from time to time and sometimes in such a way that the whole thing gets corrupted. *****. I've heard Time Capsule has a similar but less common issue. If that's the case they should not even sell that product. It at least needs to be robust in the face of a power failure. It needs to be possible to check the disks properly and repair the damage of a sudden power failure.

However, I have been happily running (except for the switchover to Lion) with a USB powered hard drive attached to a Mac mini. The fact that it is attached to a real computer running Mac OS X means it's (1) supported and really should work and (2) has a more reliable connection with a real OS that is capable of checking the disks and repairing them. It works well. My main concern was leaving a Mac Mini on 24/7 but I solved that problem by just running it during the day. I don't care if backups aren't possible during the night. I sleep all my computers at night anyway.

So - long-winded reply. I am curious about your setup. No backup solution is 100% reliable. Time Machine is great because it's basically effortless if you buy a drive and plug it in. It's harder if you use a network drive, but the convenience of that is awesome (don't have to unplug your hard drive to take your laptop elsewhere, and you don't have to wait for the hard drive to spin up whenever you popup a file dialog!).

And finally, none of this is reliable because your house  might be burned down or you might live in Louisiana, which is what happened to my sister in 2005. So I backup everything of importance to an server in the sky as well. The only thing that could screw me is if my house burns down AND my server gets blown up at the same time.

Cheers!

I use a Drobo FS that has Time Machine support out of the box. I suspect that the problem is that Time Machine isn't very fault tolerant to network disconnects and being put into sleep mode. I use a Gigabit LAN to connect to the Drobo FS for the affected machine.

You're right that there's no crucial need to have backups all the way back to 2008, but it's a problem if at any given point in time I'm back to zero backups because Time Machine finds inconsistencies and wants to start all over. If at that point my drive fails I have nothing.

Hi @neostar,

According to this document youmust be attached to another Mac computer to actually be supported.

     http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/15139.html

However, any time one or the other end loses power unexpectedly, I have found that you can end up with issues. I have been having very little trouble since I started using the Mac mini. But that probably doesn't mean that I will be OK if the Mac mini loses power in the middle of a backup. Probably an old, low power laptop would be the best choice: a power failure would allow it to fail gracefully.

Good luck!

The Drobo FS is fine, it has even backup power to write the last data to the disks in case of a power failure. I never had a single issue with Snow Leopard. Like I said it has out of the box support for Time Machine over AFP, no tweaking on any machine necessary to make it work. We have a very stable power grid here, so I think it's more a problem that Time Machine in Lion does a) better consistency checks or b) isn't good in handling sleep mode.

Wilbur Pan wrote:

 

Can you be more explicit as to how to go about deleting the fseventsd directories? Is that on your Mac or a folder on the TIme Machine hard drive? And do yo need to reboot your computer and/or your Time Machine afterwards?  I don't want to have to resort to the "wait for a crash" method. 

I have been deliberately un-explicit about this because I'm not sure how safe it is, and haven't tried it myself. But if I still had the problems myself, I would try:

1) Become root:

sudo bash

2) Go to the fsevents directory:

cd /.fseventsd

3) delete all files there (don't do this before you are 110% sure that the cd operation in (2) worked and you're in the right place!):

rm *

You need to repeat step 2 (and then 3) for the TM disk (and other connected disks that you are backing up):

cd /Volumes/<disk name>/.fseventsd

rm *

4) immediately after that you should restart your machine

I think this would have solved my problems if I didn't experience the power-off which made Lion delete this on its own, but please handle with care and don't shoot me if anything goes wrong, because this is 100% UNTESTED!

A negative observation: My backups now take around 2 minutes (sometimes a little more if it decides to delete some old backups) - just after the fseventd cleanup it was around 1 minute. It is now backing up slightly more files from my secondary disk than before, despite nothing happening on that disk. So my hunch is that fseventsd is buggy and slowly degrading over time. If it gets any worse, I might try the recipe above myself.

As the poster says above, be very careful when deleting .fseventsd. This really ought not to be necessary (though it could possibly work).

I am back to <1 minute backups now *without* deleting .fseventsd and *without* deleting my entire backup set.

Al I did was suspend automatic backups (i.e. turn Time Machine *off*) while it was doing the stupid re-index-everything-and-peg-the-cpu-for-an-hour and wait for it to complete. I also changed the Energy Saver settings to make sure my laptop could not enter sleep mode during the reindexing.

Automatic Time Machine backups have been fast and unintrusive ever since for me. This might be worth a try before resorting to more drastic measures.

The crucial thing seems to be that a) entering sleep or b) starting another TM backup disrupts the indexing process, resulting in endless/slow backups. It was only when I prevented both of these things that Time Machine was able to sort itself out.

This seems to be a clear bug and I don't think this is a permanent fix. I fully expect that I will accidentally sleep my Mac at the wrong moment, which will trigger the problem again...

I also did the same a few times already, but TM comes for some reason back to the old and wrong behaviour. But it helps for a few days.

Yes, figures. This workaround won't fix the underlying bug.

Mine's been fine for a week now. I increased the standby time to 1 hour (from 15 mins) and have been careful not to close the lid during a backup. It hasn't rebuilt the index yet...

It's baaaack!!

15/09/2011 08:19:05.684 mds: (Normal) DiskStore: Rebuilding index for /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb

No errors before that, no sleep, no interrupted backup, nothing.

Followed by the inevitable Time-Machine-backup-starts-while-index-is-being-created a little later...

15/09/2011 10:18:28.659 com.apple.backupd: Waiting for Spotlight to finish indexing /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb

15/09/2011 10:18:39.151 com.apple.backupd: Starting standard backup