Q: time machine very slow with mountain lion

Thanks.  I will try your fix.  This really is a bad joke that apple is passing on.  How could one possibly have tested and not seen this. 

Well, from what I saw, it is not a easily reproductible bug: it sometimes work (it worked for me during two weeks)

Maybe they tested it, but not enough... And as it is a problem between TimeMachine and Spotlight indexing, it is not easy to fix.

Maybe Apple hope we will upgrade to MountainLion. I will not since it has other problems with my MBA

Yea I hear you but with $100B + in the bank, I don't care how hard it is.  Apple can fix it.  In the end there is no excuse for this and like I said before, with the total number of bugs in all of the releases of late someone is clearly dropping the ball big time.

I sadly agree with you.

Been on the phone with tier 2 Apple tech support for 40 minutes now.  The CSR I'm speaking to has not heard of this problem. 

I've tried everything I've found on this post so far, without luck.

I've got a 17" MBP, 8 GB RAM, 10.8.2.  I'm using a 1 TB Firewire HDD.

I'll keep you posted.

Even the workaround I proposed here did not work ?

How's this?

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/65486/how-to-fix-slow-spotlight-and-tim e-machine-since-10-7-5/65667#65667

I tried that suggestion from StackExchange and it did not work for me.

An update:

After reinatalling 10.7.5 from the App Store, Time machine recorded approx. 1.2 GB of data in 11 hours and has continued to run as it it should.

Excluding unnecessary drives in Spotlight made the new Spotlight indexing very short, a matter of minutes.

Good luck,

Bill

@lauhub: As I understand it, that suggestion isn't a real solution, unfortunately. Time Machine relies on Spotlight to make proper backups.

William, That is extremely slow to back up 1.2 gigs. IMO you're situation is not fixed.

Everyone else, I've been following this thread since it started, and it seems to me the only solution is to change how you use Time Machine and just figure out what works.

I used to back up to TM over a network share from my company server, but now am just running it to a HD I put in the optical drive of my MBPro awhile back when I installed an SSD.

I imagine it will be some time before Apple fixes this. I spent hours trying to fix it orginally (and was quite mad and frustrated then), and then soon realized time is to short on this earth.

I'd recommend finding another solution that works for you and go with that until a fix comes out.

Is that fair to us? No.

Maybe they tested it, but not enough... And as it is a problem between TimeMachine and Spotlight indexing, it is not easy to fix.

I think the release date may have been driven by various requirements of iOS 6 coming out.  As far as I can see, the only problem between Spotlight and Time Machine is a competition for CPU resources. The Spotlight index is required for TM to function correctly, so needs to be allowed to complete first.

Well, I am trying the "toast Spotlight and rebuild it fix".   I will let you all know in a WEEK if that works.  Started reindexing my machine (210Gb on System HD and 167Gb on a second internal HD) and Spotlight is telling me it will finish the task in a mear 6 days.  So to index 1.6M files give or take a few takes 518,400 seconds.   Wow..... that is a whopping 3 files/second.   I'm really impressed.  I could almost do it faster by hand with some paper and pencil..............................

I know..... it must be using the Map app in IOS 6 to locate my files on my drive!  That's whats going on.   I wonder if I can force Spotlight to use Google Maps instead. 

@dolfke's solution worked for me under Lion.

Prior to this fix, and after several other attempts, TM was indicating it would take 400 days to back up 60GB over the network to a fresh TM. I was skeptical but ran the command as below and somehow this cleaned up things to the point where now it's going to take only 3-4 hours for 40GB. Can't believe it! I'm already 2GB in after 10 minutes whereas yesterday it took 10 hours to get that far. Thanks so much!

dolfke wrote:

 

How to run tmdiagnose

 

 

1) Launch Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)

2) Enter the command text below followed by the Return key on the Terminal command line:

 

 

sudo tmdiagnose

 

 

3) Enter your admin password when prompted and wait for all of the tmdiagnose processes to finish.

Hi - this is my first post - I hope it comes through okay. I have been suffering with Time machine for the last several weeks. I am running 10.7.5 on a mac mini, which is wired to my router (i.e no wifi). I had read many threads on this issue and I am glad to hear that some people have success with disk tests, disk warrior, etc. I didn't. My time machine drive is an external USB 2G drive.

I purchased a second 2G drive so I can store my existing Time Machine drive offsite. When I attempted to create use the new drive I would receive stats that it would take so many hundreds of days to back up 990 GB. When Time Machine ran, the activity monitor would often show no disk activity.

I finally found a solution on a another site which requires spotlight to be totally shut down. The command I used was:

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

I found this at: http://osxdaily.com/2011/12/10/disable-or-enable-spotlight-in-mac-os-x-lion/

My Time machine is really humming now at a consistent 35 MB/sec, and 990 GB should take a total of 10 hours, according to Time Machine.

This had been painful - but things are looking good now. The backup should be complete tomorrow - I will let you know if I encounter any problems. Good Luck!

George