Q: time machine very slow with mountain lion

I did go ahead and start a TM backup to the NAS at 3AM, and woke up at 8:30 and the 60GB backup was done.  TM indicates the last backup was at 6:31AM.  So far so good, without messing with spotlight, but no 10.8.2 Suplemental installed.  I was on 10.8.2 before I did the supplemental, and then it broke sometime after that.  Reinstalling 10.8.2 without the supplemental (no wipe and format) seems to be working.

I also have a thumb drive with the ML 10.8.0 or 10.8.1 installer on it, which I had the foresight to create (copied the files during a restore after the files were downloaded but before hitting the "install" button).  So I go go back to an older version of ML if I had to.  I will probably want to snag the 10.8.1 and 10.8.2 OSX updaters before they disappear, but I'm leaving town now. 

I have been having no end of trouble.

TM on an external usb drive attached to imac. Local back up fine.

From my macbook over the network though, borked. However i was getting issues with screen sharing the imac and sharing its folders so assumed something with my network, although its been fine for a year.

Any how after much faffing, i established something is wrong so decided to try putting the tm drive onmy mac mini also running ML.

All network share issues with the imac immediatly fixed as soon as the network tm drive was no longer on it, and sure enough loads of issues sharing the mini now with frequent 'to many users connected' errors where i had never had an issue before i am convinced TM is some how involved with the whole sharing issue i am experiencing.

The imac reported 39 days to back up to the network drive, and this after i wiped the drive. I tried turning off spotlight to no avail.

In short TM borked, and any mac that is trying to act as the TM backup has network shares / screen shares issues.

Night mare.

I had to start a fresh backup of my MBP. Time Machine is endlessly "Preparing backup...

Macs are running 10.8.2, and the Time Machine disk is hosted remotely on my iMac.

The iMac and MBP are both connected via gigabit ethernet; the MBP is using DHCP with manual address. Wireless is disabled on the MBP.

I unloaded and reloaded Spotlight and rebuilt the Spotlight index and tried the backup again. It is still endlessly preparing backup.

I had this working fine in 10.8.0. and 10.8.1.

There is hope!

After weeks of trouble and enquiring TM runs absolutly smooth and fast now.

Perhaps the index has been rebuild but I have not done anything to my mac!

Hope you guys enjoy the same miracle. Good luck!

Na, I am not relying on miracles for my back ups. Sadly I am not aware of other back up solutions that are as automated as timemachine.

So like every one else I have had to shell out 20 bucks for server. Which like everyone else has fixed the problem, its now really fast, as fast as my network will allow.

At work we have both mac client machines and a mac server and TM is still slow for backups. I started over with my backup after updating to 10.8.2 on all machines and the server and it was fast, but the incremental backups now are still much slower than before. Hopefully yours will stay fast!

Gary i wrote:

 

Sadly I am not aware of other back up solutions that are as automated as timemachine.

I mentioned this a few times; Carbon Copy Cloner. You can schedule it to back up every hour if you like, just as Time Machine does. It archives files that were changed since the last time in dated folders. Everything else is an exact clone of your hard drive, and is bootable too. I have it set to run at midnight, as the hourly thing was too obtrusive to me. I also have it do a separate backup of my iTunes folder to a different external drive every day at 10 PM.

After being plagued with the Finder locking up, and Safari not loading pages, Outlook taking forever to load, and other issues, I decided to do a fresh backup, format my hard drive, install a fresh copy of 10.8.2, and then restore from the backup drive. The whole process took about 4 hours, including the fresh backup. I used Apple's Migration utility to copy the files back over. I had to repair permissions on my hard drive, and then I was good to go.

My iMac is running so much better now, just like it used to. This might have even fixed the Time Machine issue, but since I'm using Carbon Copy Cloner now I'll never know.

Thanks for that, I do use CCC for basic clones, but how do I search for a thing last wednesday kind of thing (just out of interest)

Gary i wrote:

 

Thanks for that, I do use CCC for basic clones, but how do I search for a thing last wednesday kind of thing (just out of interest)

It makes archive folders with the dates on them. So if a file was modified, deleted, etc., since the last update, it will be in that folder. In those folders are the folders that the file was in; Desktop, Documents, etc.

Maybe not as elegant as Time Machine, but I needed to have a backup, and that wasn't going to happen any time soon when TM stopped working. I had been suing this for basic clones, but it works very well in this context.

It also doesn't slow down the whole machine when doing its thing.

verdi1987 wrote:

...

I unloaded and reloaded Spotlight and rebuilt the Spotlight index and tried the backup again. It is still endlessly preparing backup.

...

I had this working fine in 10.8.0. and 10.8.1.

Good intel @verdi as it seems to me that the problem happened with 10.8.2 although some people feel it began as early as 10.8.0. So this is good feedback.

When you unloaded Spotlight, that's where you restart your computer, make sure Spotlight is unloaded, and attempt to run the Time Machine. Before you reload/rebuild. You only reload Spotlight after a fast/successful TM backup. Otherwise, leave Spotlight unloaded.

If Time Machine is still slow while Spotlight is unloaded 1) try to unload Spotlight from both computers (the source computer is critical) and 2) if you have room, move the desination computer's old Time Machine sparsebundle somewhere else and start a new one. You may now be choking on the old Time Machine file so it's time to start fresh.

You could try going back to automatic DHCP as well (iMac wireless needs to be off too) .. make sure you can do a fast Finder copy between the computers while you're at it...

Thanks for the tips. I still can't get it to work. I have tried upwards of ten times today.

I unloaded Spotlight and restarted. I completely reset Time Machine by deleting com.apple.TimeMachine.plist, re-added my exclusions, and set the backup to my network share (from which I deleted the old sparsebundle). The network share has wide open permissions.

Time Machine creates the sparsebundle, but the bundle never gets more than a handful of MB in size. Time Machine endlessly shows "Preparing backup..."

This is beyond frustrating because it was working without issue until 10.8.2. Console log shows nothing of note except that whenever I try to cancel, it apparently times out ("com.apple.backupd[33]: Cancellation timed out - exiting").

I also reinstalled the 10.8.2 combo update.

verdi1987 wrote:

 

Time Machine creates the sparsebundle, but the bundle never gets more than a handful of MB in size. Time Machine endlessly shows "Preparing backup..."

Mine did that for three days straight.

The fix that worked for my mid-2007 MacBook Pro was to turn off 5GHz (didn't mess with Spotlight, strictly an RF solution).  I've just replaced that laptop with a new MacBook Pro, and migrated to the new one with Apple Migration Assistant (over Ethernet).  I turned 5GHz networking back on, and do not have the slow backup issue on the new laptop.

I have a freshly reformatted 2TB G-tech drive connected with FW800 to my MBP running 10.8.2. I'm trying to run an initial back up of about 395GB. TM says over 10,000 days. It's been stuck on 400K of backed up data for the last 10 min. TM on ML is a disgrace to Apple. They should have not released the new OS if they coudn't fix bugs prior to launch.

Any indication that this problem will be resolved any time soon?  I have the same problem on 3 Macs on my LAN (with TM bacskups wirelessly to my Time Capsule) and 1 Mac Pro that has local backup to a hard drive connected by FW.

For the past 10 plus hours my Mac Pro is "Backing up 460.1 MB of 621.8 MB".  Three Macbook Pros are all stuck in continous wireless backup to the Time capsule and an attached USB drive.

John