Time Machine VERY Slow

Several people here proposed different solutions to the same problem, so you might want to check it out. I've long cease to use Time Machine in favor of syncing my Home folder with its back-up equivalent over my home network, and it takes about one hour for about 40Gb of personal data. I suspect some heavy rewrite somewhere along the way, but I let it go, and I haven't lost a byte of data in over two years.

Hello:

An initial backup (what you are doing) is quite slow - but measured in hours, not days.

Incremental backups are very fast.

By the way, Time Machine only copies data - not the entire drive.

Barry

P.S. (edit). I am a bit paranoid about backups, so I have several - both Time Machine and bootable clones made by SuperDuper! ($28 US at www.shirt-pocket.com).

Message was edited by: Barry Hemphill

Ben (NYC) wrote:

I am running time machine, using a freshly formatted FireWire drive (connected via FW 400). Time Machine, as expected, is copying most of my hard disk onto the backup drive. However, the copy is going EXTREMELY slowly for some reason. It's going at about 1GB/hour,

That should run at, very roughly, 50-55 GB/hour.

See the green box in #D2 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting for some possible fixes.

Free space on your startup volume could be important too: same as a defragmentation tool needs some free space as buffer, so does Time Machine. Imagine your target disk is almost full and you're in the middle of a back-up.

Same as when you burn data on a disk, the data to be burned is first buffered on your hard drive. That goes the same for any data transfer from one place to another: the data is first stored on the source drive (provided it's writable) in chunks, then written/transferred onto the target drive/disk. If you don't have enough free space on your source drive, then the data has to be processed into smaller chunks before it's buffered, then transferred. If you need to transfer, say, one big video file, and your free space is inferior in size to this file, it'll have to be cut into pieces before it's actually transferred, and this will take some time. It adds a layer of security to your back-up: if there's a power outage mid-backup, the buffered data isn't lost to the transfer process. It won't have to be processed again when the power's back on.

Sorry for the late response, but only ran into this problem this week.

Emptying the trash can solved the problem for me ?!?!

Not that that makes any sense to me, anyway, thought I should share.

It actually makes perfect sense: what's in your Trash still takes disk space until you empty the Trash. If your problem came from lack of free space on your hard drive, then emptying the Trash did free some space your system obviously needed to perform its Time Machine back-up faster.

For those who have found time machine slow - i found a fault that may help some people.

I have a LaCie 3T drive with thunderbolt - divided into 3 partitions - one of which was an ExFat drive.

This (ExFat) was the problem - either eject it or format it to Mac OS Extended.

Time machine doesn't like any partition in ExFat.

start time machine again - problem solved - 250gig of backup in 35 minutes

I have been having the same problem with Time Machine since upgrading to Yosemite.

Specifically, TM now will backup (on USB 2) only 0.5 GB/hour, which means that it will take several *months*(!) to backup the drive, rendering TM essentially useless.

In contrast, on the same iMac, Carbon Copy Cloner backs up about 50-100GB/hour, that is, some 100-200x faster than TM!!

The iMac has 32GB of RAM, is NOT using any USB hubs, and we have tried multiple external drives, cables and USB ports. But still TM will not back up properly. We even tried increasing the TM process priority (using "renice") and that helped, but only a little.

Does anyone have any idea how to fix this situation? I have spent hours on the phone with Apple Level 2 support, and they cannot fix it. Can you?? 🙂

Best regards,

Evan

(Manhattan)