Q: time machine very slow with mountain lion

Bill thanks for your post, I'll stop investing nights and weekends into investigating my network setup now based on your report.

I remain astounded at the Apple silence policy in this and similarly-unacknowledged prior issues (how many of us have MBP's purchased in resignation to replace cooked-thermal-paste prior model?).  There's so much goodwill from Apple afficionados that no marketing damage would be sustained by courteous handling of the issue, viz.:
1.  We acknowledge there is a problem.

2.  (Describe the phenomenon and to the extent possible document who is affected).

3.  We are determined to expeditiously resolve the problem.

4.  In the meantime you should _________________

5.  We promise to post timely updates at _____________ until resolved.

... which would provide me and I suspect most others with sufficient confidence to continue buying Mac.

Is it a stock-shock sensitivity?  Just corporate culture or a divisional quirk?  Who knows.  What I do know is:  issue disclosure is now the prerogative of users, all one has to do is broadcast frustrations factually on Twitter.  What Apple is doing is failing to engage a priceless opportunity to manage issue impact/contagion.

William Abbott wrote:

 

I have been having all these same problems and my Time Machine HD is one of the four INTERNAL HDs in my 10.7.5 Mac Pro.

 

Make sure you have excluded the other partitions in TM Preferences>Options and also in Spotlight Preferences>Privacy (else give it a long time to complete the indexing first).

I hear that both iPhoto and iTunes need to be quit, to ensure Time Machine backs up their data.  It may be worth a try, in case their presence actually stalls the process?

I would question the wisdom of having your backup on the same computer, in the case there is a system failure.  An external bootable clone is always a good option.

I have two backup disks for each of my boot drive and photo s drive, one set stored off site.

From a review of when this disaster struck, I believe it was the 10.7.5 that did me in. New posting in the forum say that returning to 10.7.4 solves everything.

I'll have ro figure out how to do that with my off-site backup boot disk since I cannot use TM in my current 10.7.5 to do it. Wht? Because I erased the unresponsive TM HD trying to get TM to work again.

Best,

Bill

 

I erased the unresponsive TM HD trying to get TM to work again.

 

 

This is what I did too. I figured I needed a fresh start anyway but from what Pondini says, it should have been possible to pick up from where I left off. 

http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

I have heard that 10.7.5 may have problems but don't know how you would now get back to 10.7.4 unless it is on one of your backup disks and you can update your data on it, then clone it back again. 

Since their may be many other users with this problem, and you may have lost the TM timeline anyway, perhaps a good clone backup scheme could get you by, until a fix comes.

Here we go again still backing up now up from 18 days to 260 days.

Apple moderators Wake up !!!!

Anything like " we are working on it" would be welcome, go ask Tim, he seem to know how this works , he wrote a great example ettter on that wonderful Map app you guys made

I remembered that caution is the better part of valor so I chose as Step One in getting my Time Machine back on track was to reinstall 10.7.X from the App Store from whence it came.

I say "10.7.X" because a priori I could only assume that the download would be the latest and, theorectically, the greatest. I was right; I have reinstalled 10.7.5.

The good news: Time Machine is now backing up two HDs with a total of about 1.2 GB onto a newly erased 3 GB internal HD in my Mac Pro.

The current estimated time to completion varies and is now "about a day;" the number varies with time. That is much better than the 200+ days I was once promised!

So my saga is ended, at least for now, and I now remember the lesson of my prior experience:

When all else fails, reinstall the system.

I have been an Apple user (Apple II+) beginning in 1980 and a Mac user since my Mac Plus in 1986, so I've been though a lot of ups and downs.

Good luck to you all,

Bill

Time Machine just does not work as intended with 10.7.5. A step back to 10.7.4 is the only solution until our friends at Apple correct this error. Stupidly following an old cnet article I reformatted my back up disk before discovering that the problem was Apple's 10.7.5 software, so I now have no back up. Dear Apple, please correct this ****-up asap!

I can concur that on two identical configurations, except for the OS [One running10.7.5., one running 10.7.4) on the same network I have variations of DAYs between backup speeds.

I will attempt a re-install and see what happens?

Thanks

Cet

Hello

before reinstall try

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.

this seems to have solved at  least temporarly the problem...crossing fingers

Some other have solved the problem by disabling Spotlight completely when doing a backup

Step1) From terminal.app do:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

<require password>

Step2) close all applications

Step3) try TM incremental if you have some TM backups which are consistent OR make a new TM backup

During TM process doing at Terminal prompt:  "top" ...  and when top started typing "ocpu" to sort on CPU usage, you should see process "backupd" hitting very often the top of the list with very high CPU use. Depending on your Mac processor type and disk speed will be sometimes 100+% of one core, also keep in mind that TM has long preparation phases where most of IO are reads on both TM destination AND internal DISKs so be patient. If process "Backupd has a very low CPU use this means that your backup is starving because of the bug/limitation we're discussion in this thread.

Step4) re-enable Spotlight doing:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

<require password>

These for me are just possible workarounds... Adding myself to community of:

Apple wake up people

regards, tiziano

Also craps out with Lion - now getting 10kb / hour.

Wow this is still going on. Not happy about having to pay for basic functionality but I downloaded Server.app for 20 bucks, fixed it and haven't looked back.

I'm used to these issues on my Windows machines, and do find trouble shooting fun. But when I enter my Apple verse, I expect things to just work. A tweak here, an update there, fine. but this has gone on entirely too long.

Now I have an iPhone5 that can't stay connected to any AES encrypted WAP. Never in my 30 year history with Apple has it taken this much rabbit hole troubleshooting to restore a basic, promised functionality.

The age of innocence for Apple users has ended. Might as well dive into Windows and Android. They are in no way worse than this. Apple products don't "just work" anymore.

Eric - the Server.app fix - what exactly is required to effect the fix?  Merely download/install?  Or must one run the damned thing to restore underlying OSX to normal?

This is rediculous.  Apple, in the last few months, has really fallen on their sword if you ask me.  I just upgraded my AppleTV and they managed to brick the blasted thing.  Had to disconnect it, hook it to my MPB and refresh it from scratch.  IOS6 is buggy beyond belief and now this with 10.7.5.   I just did a full backup on my wife's MBP and my MPB a few weeks ago and all finished in a relatively short period of time.  106Gb for her in 6 hrs and 300Gb for me in about 14hrs.  I decided to get a larger drive and in the mean time went from 10.7.4 to 10.7.5.  Now my backup is going to take 9 days!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! are you frigging kidding me?????????????????????

I'm really ticked.  Old Steve is rolling in his grave.  Tim C.  Fix this now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I agree with rimcrazy, this is ridiculous.

I posted here a workaround to make TimeMachine work correctly (I do not believe it completely fixes the problem but it worked for me after several unsuccessful methods).

I have to see if this method works for me.

I've removed/wiped/reassigned my WD MyBookLive, did tmdiagnose and all that.  Only thing that worked was shutting off the automatic backups, closing all programs and doing the backup manually.   At least that gets me through a full backup while I let it sit overnight.