Time Machine is slow under OS X Lion.

I've been seeing the same issue with both Preparing Backup and Indexing Backup taking an inordinate amount of time. I've repaired the backup sparsebundle as discussed above (no issues found) and am doing backups over Ethernet for now from my MacBook Pro 2.2GHz Intel Core i7 with 8GB RAM. At this point, is my only solution to simply delete the old backup that started under Snow Leopard and do a new one under Lion?

Also, do I need to delete my Spotlight Index and do a new one of those as well? If so, how do I delete that index?

I'm no expert on Time Machine, but I did just that -- deleted my old TM back up and created a new one.

TM continued to be slow and wants to do complete, not incremental, back ups.

One data point, only. Sorry.

it will be slow on its first newly backup as it will re-create the back up from scratch. its the incremental that should somehow be significantly faster. Indeed I noticed it to be performing slower than Snow leopard

Might want to check out http://dollydrive.com

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I've got a brand new iMAc 27", 3.4ghz i7, 16gb ram and 265gb solid state with 1tb normal hdd shipped with Lion installed.

I just bought a 2tb WD usb drive to use for timecapsule and IT IS SO SO SLOW!!!

The first backup (of about 600gb over two drives) took a while, understandable, but now i'm doing a backup and it took at least 3 - 5minutes "to prepare for backup" and now 15 minutes later it has completed 18kb thats right KB of a 37.3mb of timecapsule backup!!!!

I've got a MBP running snow leopard and it a bazillion times faster

Lion Timecapsule is ridiculously slow!!!!

I upgraded to Lion this week and found it to be frustratingly slow on my iMac 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. I allowed Time Machine to do a full backup after the upgrade and I allowed Spotlight to do its full index. Still, simply launching Firefox, iTunes or any app took several minutes while the color wheel spun endlessly.

I have a WD 1TB backup drive that worked flawlessly for three years with Leopard and Snow Leopard. With Lion, I soon noticed a pattern: trying to open any application (or simply switching between open apps) caused the backup drive to go into action, which stalled everything, often resulting in a force quit. Even opening a link in Firefox set the backup drive to work and stalling the entire system. I have no idea what Time Machine was doing - certainly not backing anything up - except drastically slowing down Lion.

So I turned Time Machine off and disconnected the backup drive. Lion now works as fast as I expected. Now I'll do manual backups weekly or whenever I upgrade software.

Try erasing the drive (or buy a new one) and change the format to extended journaled (case sensitive).

I've noticed that my laptop (which has a case sensitive drive attached to it) doesn't have problems, while my desktop (which is formatted for basic extended) does have problems. Hence I've just erased the disk and reformatted it, and it seems to be working fine.

Paul

I'm having exactly the same problem. I have a brand new 2.2 core i7 MBP with 8Gb RAM. It was bought new with Lion on it. I bought a 2Tb Time Capsule in the same order so both are current versions.

The Preparing backup and Indexing backup states take forever. The house runs on N wireless and with no other devices on the network (as a test) it still took forever. In fact, the incremental backups are so time consuming that I often get the spinning beach ball in other apps whilst it works itself out.

I'll run through the trouble-shooting tips provided earlier in the thread but as my experience is slightly different (i.e. not having an existing SL TM backup), I thought it was worth the post.

In my mind it's a problem with Lion that needs addressing.

thank you... I think you have recognized a core problem for some of us that is seperate from normal troubleshooting. I have a first generation time capsule and it was having all kinds of issues after a Lion upgrade. I completely rebuilt it only to have the same frustrating problem.

Once I switched my backup to a local firewire drive the problem was corrected...

That being said at the same time I also notice considerable slowness in printing. I believe this is also related to the same issue.

The frustrating side for me is.... ALL my devices are Apple. I spend a premium doing so because I know they have full control over the hareware therefore generally do not have the compatibility issues of a pc. Apple had to have known or not regression tested Lion on these devices.

I have not seen any clear message from Apple as to what they do for consumers like myself. Do I need to replace all my network devices... this seems like haste to go market where the stock price dictates intead of the consumer. I do not say that in a jab but rather a matter of fact that Apple is responsible first to the stockholders like many other companies... it is just we want to view them different.

I'm having the same issue. New iMac with a 1TB internal HD about 15% used. I connected a brand new Western Digital 2TB external via USB, just formated to extended journaled.

The time machine backup is crawling . . . gave me an estimate of 2 days to complete at first and now is forcasting a speedy 1 day to backup up 145GB of data.

People saying "Time Capsule" mean "Time Machine?" Isn't time capsule the external networked drive, time machine is the program?

Anyways, same story as most. Brand new iMac, I have a solid state boot disk and a 1TB internal drive. I bought a 2 TB iOmega drive with firewire 800 for Time Machine. On this computer I feel like time machine is always backing something up, and even if it's only a few MB's, it takes a good 20 minutes. On my 5 year old iMac running Leopard time machine would take 5 minutes or less to do a routine backup.

One question though, I also have Bootcamp and run Win7 on a partition on the solid state drive and have another partition on my internal for PC programs- is Time Machine getting choked up trying to back up data on my different partitions?

Michael Streubert wrote:

People saying "Time Capsule" mean "Time Machine?" Isn't time capsule the external networked drive, time machine is the program?

A Time Capsule is Apple hardware combining a wireless router and hard drive, that can be used as a destination for Time Machine backups and/or other data.

I feel like time machine is always backing something up, and even if it's only a few MB's, it takes a good 20 minutes.

See #D2 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

I also have Bootcamp and run Win7 on a partition on the solid state drive and have another partition on my internal for PC programs- is Time Machine getting choked up trying to back up data on my different partitions?

Time Machine cannot back up a Bootcamp partition. Depending on how the other partition is formatted, it may or may not be getting backed-up, but even if it is, after the initial backup, only changes are backed-up, so there shouldn't be a problem.

I had been experiencing the same problem. Tried many of the suggestions above. Finally called Apple (still under the 3 year service plan). We finally decided to erase Time Capsule's data and start afresh. Already the backup process is faster. Previously, the step "preparing backup" could take an hour. Now, in less than 15 mintues Time Machine has alrady backup up almost 9 GB.

If anyone is also still eligible for tech support, I stronly encourage logging in the issue.

An aside: I had a similar problem with the Mail App going into an endless loop. That problem also was fixed using suggestions from this forum. Apple is apparently aware of the endless loop problem with Lion and the Mail App and is working on a fix. The Time Machinen problem seems to be relatively new. For those of you who can't afford to lose your old data, I feel your pain.

I was experiencing very slow backup performance and even failed/hung backup attempts.

I noticed that I used a different USB-port from what I normally use. When I switched the backup completed sucessfully. Maybe it was just a one off but it might be worth checking if you run into these kind of problems...

With my MBAir, OS X Lion, TC and Time Machine I suffered also from slowness.

I found an update button for time capsule in the airport utility screen and tried that.

Now it seems to work properly: a 1.2 GB backup procedure lasted 5 minutes.

EB