Q: Time Machine incredibly slow

I am beyond disgusted with Apple, Time Machine, and Time Capsule.  I bought a new MacBook Pro Retina (Lion 10.7.5 update now) and a 3TB Time Capsule.  I had the Time Capsule for 35 days before I finally decided I had time to get it configured.  MISTAKE!   I connected my MBP to the Time Capsule via an ethernet cable and started Time Machine.  To say "DEPLORABLE PERFORMANCE" is an understatement!  I did a bunch of reading about Time Machine and Time Capsule troubleshooting ... turned off my Mac OS X Firewall, disabled Intego VirusBarrier X6 and its  firewall,  completely reset Time Machine by deleting its plist files and erased the Time Capsule and started over ... 5 times ... 190GB of data on my MacBook Pro took 3 days to back-up via ethernet!  Are you kidding me, Apple?

Now, I'm doing a wireless Time Machine backup ... 110.5MB of 213.5MB is backed up and it's been nearly 3 hours!  This is unsustainable.  I'll call Apple Support tomorrow night. 

Hi Riffin-Rich,

This is a known issue since the upgrading of Lion 10.7.5 and in ML.

There are many posters with the same issue.

The only thing ad this moment you can do is to disable Spotlight.

If you disable Spotlight than you can make a fast backup.

Read this ...

https://discussions.apple.com/message/19730536#19730536

Good luck ...

Dimaxum

Dimaxum, here in the US, we have a saying ... I don't know how it translates, but I hope it conveys even just a small sense of my appreciation:  "You are DA man!"  I can't tell you how many hours I wasted over the past week, searching and editing.  Your note solved my problem.  Thank you! 

Now, I'm trying to determine how to mark this post as "solved my problem" and give you a star ... but I can't figure it out.

Thanks again,

Rich

Don't mark it as 'solved' please - and actually, only the first person who posts can mark a solution AFAIK anyway...

...disabling Spotlight is a workaround, and a crude one at that.  Does let a TM backup progress, 'solved' suggest to Apple, if they aren't reading every post (unlikely!) - that 10.7.5 does not have a serious problem.

Hello Riffin-Rich,

You can't mark this tread as SOLVED, because this is NOT a solution to the issue Spotligh has at this moment.

The fact that it disable Spotlight to avoid LONG indexing time is that you can NOW make a backup with TimeMachine.

I hope soon that Apple comes with a solution to use Spotlight again.

For now you okay, but on longterms you can't use Spotlight.

Dimaxum

Hi Guy's. Not sure if this will help but I also have problems with TimeMachine back ups since upgrading to 10-7-5.

I have 4Gb to back up and after 4 hours all I can get to is about 176Mb.

One thing I have noticed as I have been a Mac user fo many years is the size of the upgrades now required since Lion came on board. I had an old Imac so could not get passsed Tiger without a PC upgrade which I did last year. Now all I ever get are upgrades of almost 1Gb against the typical 60Mb in Tiger.

Does this indicate that Apple have the Microsoft (sorry for the bad language) disease of issuing software before it is fully tested?

To date since buying my PC with Lion on it I have upgraded almost 3Gb of data. Seems to me to be a very poor state of affairs.

Unfortunately the work around of disabling Spotlight does not help me as I cannot fathome how to do this from the link provided.

Cheers

Tweedle Dum

Agree problem is not solved guys

Was following a previous thread last Sunday when my Time Machine backup on my macbookpro was 'frozen' and eventually I disabled Spotlighton the laptop using Terminal.

Interestingly my iMac which is also running 10.7.5 continued to function normally thus confirming the proble was not with the Time Capsule itself

MacBookPro backups returned to normal speed thereafter - temporarily...

Unfortunately today Time Machine has frozen again (434 bytes of 5.07 Gb backup after 2 hours!!  and no change since. Spotlight is still disabled and  iMac backups are still  fine.

Only changes I had made were to exclude a few movie files and other memory hungry files from the backup.

I am considering upgrading the macbookpro to Mountain Lion to 'get away' from 10.7.5

Does anyone think this is a good idea? Feels like Russian roulette

Apple - please fix this serious issue

Hi,

To everybody who is struggeling with Spotlight.

Read my latest post ...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4375642

Dimaxum

Hi,

My hard drive is 25 gigs.

I've been trying since Friday evening to back up via a USB cable. I kept stopping after a couple of hours assuming I was doing something wrong.

I tried disabling Spotlight but it extended the Time Machine back up to over 3,000 days - enabling Spotlight again did not cause any indexing problems.

I finally completed the Time Machine back up about 10 minutes ago - it took about 12 hours for 25 gigs.

I had already made back ups for iPhoto and iTunes.

My reason for backing up is that I want to upgrade the MacBook to Mountain Lion, but I want to have a back up of Lion in case the battery issue causes problems and because Lion is no longer downloadable.

Do you guys think that the Time Machine back up is reliable even though it took so long or should I wait until Apple fix the issue and back up again?

Cheers

Hi Dimaxum,

I tried uninstalling the spotlight using the terminal.

But I got the following error

launchctl: Error unloading: com.apple.metadata.mds

Can you please help. Thanks