10.7.5 Time Machine uselessly slow?

I lost all of last night wrestling with this. After letting it run over night as some posting suggested it had only backed up 17 GB after 12 hours and was projecting 5 days back up the remaining 160GB. This thread

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4145494?start=165&tstart=0

seems to indicate that something happened in the 10.7.5 update. Don't know if that's the case but hopefully someone will get it sorted. Because this is a brand new laptop and I had no other backup I had to fall back to the SmartWare backup software that came with the Western Digital drive. It seems to be cruising along very well. But I'll be happier when Time Machine is working again.

I'd suggest checking out this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4324046?start=0&tstart=0, especially the last page. The culprit seems to be Spotlight, and turning it off speeds things up drastically. You'll lose indexing and the search capability but EasyFind can fix that.

Thanks. That fixed it. I had earlier tried to disable Spotlight by adding the backup drive to the Spotlight Privacy list. When I tried that I got a message that said that Spotlight understood that the drive was a Time Machine drive and it would disable indexing of everything EXCEPT for Time Machine Backups. Next I tried to disable Spotlight all together using

sudo mdutil -a -i off

After doing this and checking the status of indexing with

sudo mdutil -a -s

I saw that indexing was disabled for

/Volumes/My Book

which is the mount point for the Time Machine backup drive but when I backup was running I saw that indexing WAS STILL ENABLED for

/Volumes/My Book/Backups.backup

and I couldn't figure out how to turn it off until I saw the "

sudo launchctl unload" command in that link.  Thanks.  I don't use Spotlight so for me it's no big deal.  Thanks again.

You're welcome.

I had done the same things you did but then learned from that link in the thread how to really turn off indexing too. Now even booting is faster.🙂

I don't use Spotlight either and have been using and recommending EasyFInd for very fast searching; it reminds me of FastFind from Classic days.

EasyFind does its search in real time, no pre-indexing. It doesn't, however, search file contents, which is the downside of not running Spotlight. The only time I search contents is in emails and Thunderbird can do that so it isn't a limitation, at least for me. But it's fast, lists all occurrences, and will reveal them, even hidden files and folders, in the Finder.

Wouldn't make a move without clones. I've got 11 partitions in the Mac Pro along with 11 TB of backups in four externals. But Time Machine is still pretty cool.

Disabling Spotlight should be done as a temporary measure while a manual TM backup is performed then reenabled. Spotlight is part of the os and used by software updates, and app store, and TM.

I have restored to 10.7.4 using TM.

Sorted.