time machine slow in 10.7.5

Read above . Superduper! to make a clone!

I am moving on! Upgraded to Mountain Lion (my goal all along!).

My problem with the recent Lion upgrade was that the full backup of my startup disk was taking forever. I disabled Spotlight, and was able to back up the disk using Time Machine.

Then I erased the startup disk and installed Mountan Lion. Then I restored the backup to the startup disk. Everything OK.

I waited while Spotlight did its indexing, then I requested a backuo using Time Machine.

Everything SEEMS okay. I have backed up 6 Gb of 551 GB in about 5 minutes, and it wil take about 8 hours to do the whole thing, over a USB 2.0 link to the new drive I bought. I am OK with that. Incremental backups do not take too long after that.

As I wrote this, the backup time decreased to 6 hours, and 12 GB have been backed up.

I think this is the best solution, but it never should have happened in the first place!

cheers

Dave

Same problem here. I upgraded to 10.7.5 and the slow backups started happening immediately after...

I have the same problem. Obviously a global issue affecting many, if not all users.

Come Apple! I thought the releasing of software that's broken was Microsofts job...

Same on Macbook Air (June 2012) to USB. Did a time machine backup before install of 10.7.5, updated to 10.7.5, time machine wanted to take 9 hours to backup 119 GB, got to with 8 GB then stopped altogether. I'd tried FIXAMAC's Spotless tool to turn off spotlight and time behaved normatlly. I turned on spotlight and the problem reoccurred. Called Apple Care who and eventually got to someone who had me run their Capture Data too and send them the results. Awaiting call back.

"Try this"'s before my call before running Spotless - repair disc, repair permissions, repair user permissions (via resetpassword). I also did a reinstall using the 10.7.5 Combo update. All to no avail.

It seems obvous to me that the problem is in spotlight.

The irony is that I did a time machine backup before installing 10.7.5 and could not use it after 10.7.5 was installed. So what good was Apple's advice to do a time machine backup before the install?

Next step for me: waving the white flag and retrograding to 10.7.4 from the combo update.

Having similar problem after upgrade to 10.7.5 via Software Update. Have had to cancel Time Machine backups because they just dont seem to progress. Apple can you give us a fix?

I'm in contact with support, too. TM backups taking better part of an hour, Spotlight reindxing--after one full day at it, stil reading "4 days remaining." Intolerable

... Next step for me: waving the white flag and retrograding to 10.7.4 from the combo update.

If that is exactly what you mean, I do not believe you can do this. OS X 10.7.4 should refuse to install over a later update, but try it. Let me know if it works.

I think you may have to revert by booting OS X Recovery and restoring from a previous Time Machine backup of OS X 10.7.4. That will work, and will restore Spotlight / Time Machine's normal behaviour.

Obviously this will cause whatever work you performed subsequent to that backup to be lost, initially. To recover any work performed subsequent to that backup, "Enter Time Machine" and restore the individual files.

Same problem. TM start to back up and then freezes at 30MB.... (nothing).

I called technical support and obviously the tech was oblivious to this problem.

She recommend that I take the computer and the hard disk to the shop to run diagnostic.

This is a deja vu of my MS Windows days......... welcome to the dark side 🙂

HM

Apple suggests otherwise:

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH4340?viewlocale=en_US

tmg2010 wrote:

Apple suggests otherwise: ...

That KB article does not address installing an earlier Combo update over a later OS version, tmg. It addresses restoring from a Time Machine backup, which is what I suggested:

John Galt wrote:

I think you may have to revert by booting OS X Recovery and restoring from a previous Time Machine backup of OS X 10.7.4. That will work, and will restore Spotlight / Time Machine's normal behaviour.

As I wrote earlier, attempting to revert by installing the 10.7.4 Combo update over an existing 10.7.5 installation is not likely to be successful. No harm in trying though.

Thanks for the advice, John. But I learned my lesson a long time ago. I do two identical point-in-time backups weekly to two different USB disks of the crown jewels and especially before a system upgrade. If the system won't retrograde, I'll go down to the Apple Store "genius" bar and have them reload 10.7.4. I know that's a possiblity because I had my MacBook Pro retrograded to 10.6.8 a couple of weeks ago because Lion didn't support a critical app I needed.

At this point, I'm pretty tired of being effectively a "beta" tester for Lion. I haven't had this amount of trouble ever on a level of OS X and I've been using it since Cheetah (OS X) when I bought my first MacBook in 2001.

"Genius" bar - they told me that Apple doesn't sell Turing compatible Von Neumann (Princeton) machines. Such is the way of support these days.

Mea culpa, John Galt.

I respect your experience. What do you think of the following?

1. This thread demonstrates that there is a wide-spread problem. I believe that Apple does not necessarily monitor Support Communities. I suggest people register their concerns (increase the squeakiness of the wheel) at:

https://bugreport.apple.com/

and

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

2. One way to revert to 10.7.4 is described at http://support.apple.com/kb/PH4340?viewlocale=en_US

3. To update to 10.8.2 first check your hardware at http://www.apple.com/osx/specs/ and your essential software at http://roaringapps.com

4. If you decide to wait for an Apple solution "love the one you're with" - S. Stills (1970)

capt huffnpuff wrote:

"Genius" bar - they told me that Apple doesn't sell Turing compatible Von Neumann (Princeton) machines. Such is the way of support these days.

😁

I was so repulsed by OS X Public Beta that I reverted to OS 9, until Jaguar's release.

Go ahead and restore 10.7.4. Might as well put Time Machine to work; that's what it's there for.

This too shall pass. They'll fix it.

Thanks for the bug report link.

The fact that others have related Apple "is aware of the problem" seems highly atypical to me, and suggests they may have a fix already in the works.

4. If you decide to wait for an Apple solution "love the one you're with" - S. Stills (1970)

Amen to that 🙂