Q: time machine very slow with mountain lion

ways to meaure the various through put...  I can only suggest using Activity Monitor.  Disk and Network activities can be seen as can CPU use by various processes.   "backupd" is the Time Machine process.

I was having trouble until I quit all my running apps.  Of course as has been pointed out, this is not acceptable for normal operation, but if others can confirm the method works, even for some, then it can get reported to Apple.

Hello WeepingAngel

just to let you know, by using Active Monitor I saw my "backupd" was using 0.03% CPU when starving and doing nothing, NAS was idle and "wired" network was very low usage as well.

Curious to to see what are your results..

regards, Tiziano

PS) going to upgrade to Mountain Lion because of my company policies... not expecting improvement anyway since thread was created for ML

Putnik

The method I've found that actually works is to turn off the time capsule at the powewr socket.  Leave it 30 seconds and then turn it on and let it set itself up. This takes about 30 seconds.  It then works fine for a couple of days.  Again, not really an acceptable solution but it does work.

I was having the same problem on my early 2010 MacBook running Lion.  I hadn't backed up since January but I was trying to backup before upgrading to Mountain Lion.  It took forever and got stuck at 26GB of 78GB so I stopped the backup and just backed up pics and music. I ended up biting the bullet and upgrading anyway hoping the upgrade would fix Time Machine.  Well, it didn't. 

So, at the guidance of peeps in here and other threads, I turned off Spotlight indexing via terminal and BOOM it worked!  Yesssssss!!!!  I just turned Spotlight back on after the initial backup and Time Machine seems to be working fine.  I can't say how long it took to backup because I left it on overnight while I slept but it was running pretty fast from what I saw.

A similar TM reset may have been what got mine going, since I messed up my settings and had to start again too.

No, no, no! It shouldn't take 2 and a half days to backup 19 GB! Something is horribly wrong.

I have the same problem and Spotlight is NOT indexing. I thought it might be a problem at first, but obviously it's not.

If there is no solution to the Time Machine slowdown, does anybody have any experience with other backup programs? Do they work better?

I have exactly the same problem with Lion: this is not unique to ML.

I have exactly the same problem with Lion: this is not unique to ML.

Hello mates

yesteday I migrated to ML (10.8.2) because of corporate policies.

I wasn't expecting improvement on TM because of the origin of this thread..

WOW! surprise today when trying for n-th time doing a TM Initial Backup!

Everything back to original speed (Peak 80+MBytes /sec on large files) with Mac really challenging the NAS and NAS challenging TM (backupd process) and Mac too.

so thinking on what may have changed during the upgrade...maybe many things... but...

Because of migration procedure, my company IT asked to do some pre-migration steps, the ones which are relevant were to run:

Step1) Disk Utilities.app -> First Aid -> Repair Disk Permission (approx 10 minutes to run on my 120GB SSD system disk, it  may require more on larger HDU

Step2) Disk Utilities.app -> First Aid -> Verify Disk

Step3) (required if step 2 shows errors): Disk Utilities.app -> First Aid -> Repair Disk

I personally did on all my MBP disks including 750GB HDU where most of the data still seats.

First periodic TM backup has just completed and Time Machine sees the Backups from NAS.. so seems all back to normality.

I can't dispute this is the solving factor, but you might give a try...

Regards, Tiziano

PS) will do later on on my son's Mac... and see if this applies to some others or was just a luck situation

Hi Tiziano

I did all those steps before upgrading, plus ran a full backup.

TM works fine for a few days and then fails.  Powering it off and then on solves this but that's not an acceptable solution.  Neither is turning off various parts of OSX or iLife.

To be honest I don't much care about the speed because TM should run in the background, but it failing to run is the problem.

My TM to both Time Capsule and WD Passport are extremely slow. Tried reformatting and starting again. This has not solved the problem. Apple please help! Thanks.

I have the same problem.  running TM with MBPro, previously with MBA as well, and never had any issues.  Since ML installed, it has gradually got slower.  I am currently runbning sudo tmdiagnose as this is supposed to help, and will update this post once it is complete.

anymore help from anyone in the 'know' wouldbe vastlyh appreciated.

Hello d3v

have you tried to repair disk permission and verify disk as reported in my previous post?

This solved (maybe just temporarly as chipsfortea is saying) our problem with TM, so it can be considered as workaround since I agree basically there is a bug injected from 10.7.5 and maybe 10.8.1

Keep in mind I'm now running 10.8.2 and my son's Mac 10.7.5... we've never had problem till we 've gone beyond 10.7.4. Also backup on USB attached WD Passport HDU has returned to original performances

regards, Tiziano

Hello all!

According to Apple Support, this is a known BUG, and they are working on it!

Always have at least 2 ways of backup-strategy! Carbon Copy Cloner is a good one!

Hi there.  thanks for this.  no, i've not tried it but will now. i verified disk permissions not the disk itself.  that didn't work, and i ran sudo tmdiagnose, but that didn't help either.  i'll try your suggestion.

i agree with you re the bug.  i've not had this problem with ML before.

I was originally trying to back up my iMac over a wired network to a shared drive on a Mac Mini.  This worked flawlessly with Lion, but suddenly became orders of magnitude slower with Mountain Lion (now up to 10.8.2 on both machines, no improvement).  I tried a number of suggestions posted on this thread, and nothing help.  I finally set up a call with Apple support, and after about 30 minutes, being put on hold several times while the guy consulted with other groups, I was told that backing up to a network drive with Time Machine was "not a supported configuration."

Despite some scary reviews, I decided to upgrade the Mac Mini to OS X Server (after doing a full backup with SuperDuper!).  I turned on the Time Machine feature in Server and told the iMac to back up to the new shared "Backups" directory from the Mini. Now the backups are fast again! Less than 2 hours to back up 125 GBytes.  So, $20 for Server seems to have solved the problem for me.