time machine very slow with mountain lion

Yes, looks like 10.8.1 did the trick. All seems well again. Well, back to getting the backups current. . .

No joy here! 10.8.1 did nothing for me. Same incredibly slow TM backups to Time Capsule over wireless. Hardwiring speeds things up some, but still seems slower than in Lion.

It seems like my MBP is in a perpetual state of TM backup now-- it's painful!

My MBpro is now crashing everytime TM tries to run. Everything worked well with 10.8, and since upgrading to 10.8.1 this morning, I've gotten the grey screen 6 times today. When I turn TM off, the laptop stays on, and runs fine.

I can't seem to find anyone else with this issue online......and a solution for it. I'm now wishing I stayed with Lion.... : (

After performing some more tests, I think my wireless network is the part of the problem. I extended my wireless network by connecting 2 routers via WDS.

[time capsule] <---wired---> [router 1] <---wireless WDS---> [router 2]

I can connect wirelessly to router 2 and perform speed tests and stream HD movies without problems. The network speed is pretty good. However Time Machine backups would take forever to complete.

If I connect wirelessly to router 1, Time Machine backups would finish normally. In both cases, I am connecting at 5 Ghz. So it seems that extra wireless hop is causing problems for Time Machine.

No fix for me with 10.8.1

WiFi - MBP -> Ethernet - MacMini -> Firewire 800 - External HD = Works fine

Ethernet - MBP -> Ethernet - MacMini -> Firewire 800 - External HD = Unusably slow

Large file transfers from the Mini to the MacBook over Ethernet FLY, so it's not a cabling problem.

I think you better enable the TM service woth OSX ML Server, when your HD is not directly connected to the Mac you want to make a TM backup from.

Try to connect the HD directly to the MBP when you don't want to use the ML Server.

You could try to connect to Wireless, its a cool (new) feature of the recent Airport routers, not using WDS, witch can be tricky.

I have 2 Airport.TimeCapsule connected via "Wireless", it connects 3 Mini Servers to one Airport using UTP cat. 6 (you really need cat. 6 wiring), that Airport connects wireless to my Timecapsule, and TM backups of those 3 mini servers are very smooth.

I connect Wireless to that Timecapsule to backup my MBP's, and have also smooth TM backups.

But I never use 5Ghz band, because its not reliable on larger distances than the 2.4 band is. One of my MBP is a machine of 5 years old, and is not that good in connecting to Wireless than the new ones are, especially the 5 Ghz band on more than 5 meters.

Forcing 2.4GHz "solved" the slow backup for me. I gave the 5GHz network a different name (checkbox in Airport Utility), which caused me to camp on the 2.4GHz signal. My backup completed at a rate of 4-5Mbps, versus 400kbps before - still seems slow, but it's a small sample size of one 1.6GB backup - wired backups are going at least 10x that rate as best I can tell). I'll have to judge whether my wife's backups get unusably slow (she's on Snow Leopard and hasn't had the slow backup problem on WiFi that was introduced for me with Mountain Lion).

Installing 10.8.1 did not fix it for me either. Time Machine is incredibly slow, making some non-Apple applications like Microsoft Outlook unusably unresponsive while it runs. This is a Macbook Pro 2.66GHz machine with 8GB of RAm onboard, upgraded from Lion, and connecting to a Time Capsule via wire, as opposed to wifi. One of the more disturbing effects of the upgrade was that any backups from before the Mountain Lion upgrade disappeared and the Time Machine backup that automatically started after I installed Mountain Lion was from scratch.

10.8.1 didn't fix it for me either, but installing OS X Server and turning on the Time Machine service finally did fix it.

A very handy new feature in Mountain Lion TM is you can select multiple HD's for taking backups, so when the system starts with a new backup on one Disk, you still have an archive on an other HD untouched.

Its always a good idea to have at least 3 Disks in a Backup strategy.

yep, same here (as i've written before): installing ML OS X Server (USD 20), cleaning out over 10 concurrent AFP connection attempts to the iMac (running the server app) and enabling TM service fixed the issue for me as well.

Thank you, that solved the problem for me. It's not like before I installed ML, but better.

bhurte wrote:

Forcing 2.4GHz "solved" the slow backup for me. I gave the 5GHz network a different name (checkbox in Airport Utility), which caused me to camp on the 2.4GHz signal.

I just got a 27"iMac with 10.8.1. Time Machine is bombing with two different external USB H.D.'s. On two different drives, it goes to about 341 MB's out of 656 GB's and dies. Says 28 days to go. Tech Support is working on it. Their latest suggestion was to de-install Chrome, VMWare Fusion and Dropbox. Hahaha. Can you say buggy as a June night? I am now running Carbon Copy Clone on one of the same drives Time Machine bombed on and it's zooming right along. Time Machine in Mountain Lion is very broken. Hoping they fix it soon.

I just want to throw in one additional option for people still having problems, if you have Carbonite installed, "pause" it. I was getting horribly slow backup speeds (estimated 12 days for 300GB) on a FW800 wired drive. I tried "sudo tmdiagnose" and no help. I paused Carbonite on a whim, and BAM! with 5GB backed up so far, estimated time for remainder is 6 hours.

If you don't have Carbonite, check for other applications that might be constantly crawling your drive, like other backup or antivirus software.