Time Machine encryption 3 steps, last step very slow

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Level 1

73 points

Time Machine encryption 3 steps, last step very slow

Anyone else having this issue? Any solutions?

I enabled encrypted Time Machine backups to a USB drive in Lion 10.7.1 on a latest generation 15 inch MacBook Air.

Time Machine first said it was changing the USB drive to encrypted using Core Services. That took under a minute.

Then it showed the normal time machine progress bar for the initial backup. I have about 225 Gigs and it took a few hours, as expected

Then a new third step. In the Time Machine pull down menu at the very top of the screen, it says Encrypting Backup Disk and gives a % completion. I let it run about 12 hours and it has gradually increased to 22% ... i.e. it is going to take nearly 3 days at this rate!

I don't understand why it is encrypting AFTER the initial time machine backup was finished. I had thought that once Core Services was enabled on the external drive, all the disk writes would automatically be encrypted, so it would not be necessary to do a batch encryption afterwards. And why would the encryption be so incredibly slow?

MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Aug 24, 2011 6:19 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

StevenJD

Level 2

230 points

Aug 24, 2011 7:11 AM in response to Bill Elkus

Hi Bill,

The three-step process is normal. I've seen it described in a number of articles. For whatever reason, the Time Machine encryption is not done by simply creating an encrypted external drive the way you would with Disk Utility and copying the data. It does seem slower than it should be in your case however. I had about 105 Gigs on my new Air and the third step completed overnight for me, less than 7 or 8 hours. I can't be sure of the exact time it took since I wasn't up to watch it finish. It seems like based on this yours should be more like 75 % complete in 12 hours. It may be that the percentage progress indicator is not accurate. It is also possible that it depends on the amount of free space on the time machine drive. How big is your USB drive?

The only comfort I can offer is that once it's done, the routine backups proceed just as fast as ever. It doesn't seem like the encryption makes any difference in performance once it is completed.

Steve

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Answer 2

Bill Elkus Author

Level 1

73 points

Aug 24, 2011 7:31 AM in response to StevenJD

Steve, thank you for your reply. The drive is 1 T, with two partitions. The partition on which this Time Machine backup is being placed is 750 Gigs and has nothing on it other than the Time Machine backup, which was initiated immediately after the partitioning process finished.

A somewhat related point -- my initial plan was to first create an encrypted external drive using DiskUtility, and then enable a Time Machine backup onto that drive. I discovered that DiskUtility crashes when you ask it to complete an Erase command and you choose one of the encryption options in the pull down tab for which format you want. I replicated this crash on 2 different 10.7.1 MacBookPros and on a MacBook Air, and told Apple Support about it, they have escalated it to senior people who promised to get back to me.

Since Time Machine says it is setting up the drive for encryption before it actually starts the backup process, it occured to me that a workaround for DiskUtility crashing would be to start an encrypted Time Machine backup on a freshly partitioned drive, then stop it after the "setting up encryption" process ended but before the actual backup started. I tried this on another drive and it seems to work in that in order to mount the drive, you are prompted for a password.

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Answer 3

DKay

Level 1

9 points

Apr 8, 2014 5:59 PM in response to Bill Elkus

I'm pulling teeth - its averaging about 1% an hour for about 400 gigs worth of material - this is unacceptable

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