time machine very slow with mountain lion

The rebuild of the Spotlight index seemed to have no effect. When I start the backup I get a window that says 'Cleaning Up...'. The AppleCare support guy didn't even know that that window comes up at that point in the process, I suspect because it usually disappears before you can actually register the fact that you've seen it. I killed it after 20 minutes. I am now in the process of moving all of the content off of an older 500 GB FireWire 800 drive so that I can try backing up to it to see if the difference has anything to do with the fact that I'm trying to do it over Thunderbolt. (The 500 GB drive was used for Time Machine backups with my last system. The preparing to copy window has been chugging along for several hours now. It has so far prepared to copy 847,300 items.)

If somebody speaks to Apple Support (I can't, I'm not in the US) it would be great to mention the discussion thread as did the guy that is mentioned in the message below. In that way Apple Support might realize that it's a spread problem.

BTW, for me the slow TM and the topic of the discussion I copy below (external HD ejection) are somewhat related.

Re: External hard drive ejects on sleep
created by molarmech in OS X Mountain Lion - View the full discussion

Update: I talked to a Apple Support person and have a case number reporting my problem which is I get an error message that the disk was improperly ejected. This only occures after a long sleep time like over night. He had me shut the computer down, and unplug the power for 15-20 sec. then power up again. I mentioned this Discussion thread, and he looked at it, and was going to show it to his senior advisor. The problem still exsisted this morning. I too, hope Apple fixes this issue soon!

I'm backing up from my MBP to a Time Capsule over wireless. This was lightning fast until Mountain Lion. Have done Spotlight re-indexing, updated to 10.8.1, formatted the Time Capsule, ran TMdiagnose, tinkered with Airport settings, all that jazz-- no luck.

The 10.8.2 update was no help for me, either. I just updated and started a new TM backup 3.5 hours ago, and I'm still at "Preparing Backup." The whole process, from finding the target disk to preparing backup on thru completion is still just crawling.......

I talked to Apple support weeks ago, was escalated thru their TM specialists to engineering, to whom I've sent several megabytes of log data.... no progress yet, but it seems they are aware of the issue. Must be one heck of a bug since it hasn't been addressed in two point releases so far.....

Does anybody appart from vanpatrick try OS X 10.8.2?

I also tried. Same behaviour as before (average backup rate about 100kbps). My setup is a mac mini (10.8.2) backing up over ethernet to an imac (also 10.8.2). I wondered if this was a bandwidth throttling mechanism going haywire.

I started the copy of the contents of the FW 800 drive (previous TM backups plus software provided by the manufacturer of the drive) at around 10:00am yesterday. When I last checked at around 11:00pm it had counted over 3 million files that it was preparing to copy, but had not yet started copying. When I got up this morning there was a window alerting me to the fact that the copy couldn't be performed because what was being copied was a mixture of Backup files and others. Who knew? So I've decided to just delete the old TM backup data. I should have Erased the disk using Disk Manager, but instead, I copied off the software provided with the drive by the manufacturer (which happened very quickly), then selected the backup folder for deletion. Moved it to the Trash then went to empty the trash. Took about 1/2 hour to count around 750,000 items that would be deleted. Now, at about an hour into the process of deleting, I have 660,000 left to delete. I figure it should finish today. I will keep posting with updates on my experience until this is resolved somehow.

It's a hideous joke. Apple has inhibited Time Machine over a network share unless you are running Mountain Lion "server" edition from the app store. They haven't "broken it", just made it 1/100th the speed (essentially breaking it).

Time Machine over a shared drive used to work flawlessly between networked machines but now Apple is rate limiting it so that it's a "new" feature for ML Server Edition. Nice, huh?

You could setup a Linux VM and use its share running NFS and it'll run fast (http://pwntr.com/2012/03/03/easy-mac-os-x-lion-10-7-time-machine-backup-using-an -ubuntu-linux-server-11-10-12-04-lts-and-up/). Or trick AFP to run over an encrypted (slow) SSH session and still gain about 1/50th of the time when it used to work.

********!

UPDATE:

Just got my time machine working at full speed. If you are backing to an external hard drive connected through usb, it MUST be mounted. My original time machine hd, for whatever reason, wasn't mounted anymore. So I just happened to connect a different hd, which was mounted, and started time machine. It is now backing up just fine. So now I gotta find out why my main hd isn't mounted anymore and how to fix that...

Not sure how this affects those using a mapped network drive, but those using a usb connected hard drive, make sure it's mounted.

scarroll wrote:

It's a hideous joke. Apple has inhibited Time Machine over a network share unless you are running Mountain Lion "server" edition from the app store. They haven't "broken it", just made it 1/100th the speed (essentially breaking it).

That's a ridiculous accusation. I'm using OS X Server and am experiencing the same problems as everyone else, albeit on a directly connected Thunderbolt drive. Think before you post.

24 hours after starting the process of emptying the trash after moving an old Time Machine backup to it, I am still emptying the trash. According to the progress dialog, I have deleted -4,484,912 files of 750,000 and the number continues to get smaller (i.e., a bigger negative). I have gone from 491 GB of data on the disk to 354.91 GB of data in the info view from the Finder.

I upgraded to 10.8.2 at the same time that I uninstalled the ZEVO zfs software. One or the other of these actions (or perhaps both) solved my problem. TM is working as expected. Backed up 260 GB in less than 2 hours to the Thunderbolt drive.

Have some issue - in mac mini 2 HDD ( ssd & hdd) & Mac OS X 10.7.5

Yestarday i start make new backup (time machine) from main (ssd) on second (hdd) and time shock me... it work right now more 12hr and still shows 9hr to finish... total size is 23GB - it so minor.. so don't know why so long.

Is any have any ideas?

Thanks.

And I just got mine working fast by changing my home network structure. Earlier I had a separate wireless base station connecting my computers to internet and the Time Capsule was only joining that network. But when I made the Time Capsule to be the "master" base station (and that other one I threw away) the speed of backing up went up to almost 100x. Checking the trasmit rate (holding alt and clicking the wireless icon) resulted 243 instead of the earlier maximum 48.

So, my conclusion is that the capacity of the old W:less base station was limiting the backup speed. It shouldn't but maybe the performance data the manufacturer gave on a data sheet was only theoretical.

But now I'm happy with my Time Capsule. My two Macbooks are now making automatic backups at reasonable speed.

Hi Dan

Unfortunately as a sky user I can't do this - only the sky router will connect to my broadband. Sky don't allow other routers to connect to their broadband service.

I get a transmit rate of 243 with what was your old setup anyway. All devices except iMac connect to sky router; iMac connects to time capsule which has ethernet cable connecting it to sky router in bridge mode.

Not too worried about speed of backup as i don't tend to watch them. My problem is that the imac seems to be unable to find the time capsule for more than a couple of days at a time, then the backing up stops.

Hi Chipsfortea!

Did you already rename the disk in time capsule? I had the same issue in the beginning. Time Machine just kept looking for the disk for ages without finding it. I then erased and renamed the disk (from the default Data to something like BackupDisk. Someone here wrote that hint and it really was like a magic touch.

But this was in the beginng. I think it worked first with the factory settings but stopped when I played with settings a little. Unfortunately I don't know what to do if TC stops working after being ok for a couple of days.