slow time machine backup

I was my antivirus the whole time. You think the hard drive mfr would have mentioned it!

Thanks guys

Yes, I have Avast on my mac and it was slowing TimeMachine backups to a ridiculous crawl.

Restarting in Safe Mode and restarting normally fixed my slow Time Machine problem. I'm also running Mavericks. My latest TM backup took just a few minutes. Thank you!!

Hello all, I too had a VERY slow back up today and turned off my Trend Micro antivirus software and now its FLYING!

Same problem here. I don't have antivirus or any specific security software. I tried several trick I've read here and there like removing the *.inprogress file, also deleting the whole folder of the last backup done, of course I checked the HDD I am using for Time Machine with the System Tool and even forced "Repair" even when no errors were found. None of such tricks worked.

But then I read here about booting in Safe Mode and I gave it a try, and it worked.

This is a Mac Mini (late 2012) running OSX Yosemite 10.10.5, BTW

Boot into Safe Mode and restart - as Big Hilly suggested.

This worked for me. Thanks!

The problem for me was that I had moved the time machine backup files off to another drive and then back after formatting the original drive in a different way (this time, encrypted+case sensitive+journaled). Backups were roughly 1GB per hour and with 2TB this was never going to work. I moved the old backups into a different folder and then created a fresh backup in less than 5 hours.

Thank you for your post. Avast has started to slow down many processes on my Macbook Pro, and I had to disable it in order to do backups. Avast was also slowing down Mail.

I'm running a MBPro Early 2011 10.6.8 and had installed a 1TB SSD. When I reconnected the 2TB drive FW TM wanted to start all over again. When I gave into that and let it start it was taking forever to get going.

I shut down every open program and turned off WIFI, and only ran TM in system prefs - you can see the progress bar and speed - and Activity monitor to watch the carnage then restarted my **. Read and Writes speeds went from 1 or 2 mb/sec to 78megs/sec. It would occasionally pause up to 10-15 secs. while the Finder did some heavy lifting then it would pick back up.

568 gigs backed up in 4 hours. Then the finder was busy for about a day indexing it all.

You can watch what is happening in Activity monitor>Disc Activity and open a window for CPU history. Very useful for seeing how a process works, and finding slow processes & what's hogging the CPU.

time machine enters stand by if it senses there is disk activity, or files involved in backup are being used, source and target.

So find ways to decrease disk activity to speed up Time Machine backup:

- stop antivirus software

- close unused apps

- make spotlight stop indexing files that live in the disk used for backup

The last item solved my problem. It's done in Settings ➡ Spotlight ➡ Privacy and then add to the list all volumes that live in your backup disk.

HOpe that help !

THanks guys. I was having this problem too. My newly acquired thunderbolt drive was creaking along with an estimated finishing time of three days. Then I read these replies and shut down everything possible: antivirus, internet connection, dropbox, all open programs. I estimate it will be done in just under five hours.

IN the end it raced along, finishing in just under another two hours, not the five hours I had estimated.

Virus protection software seems be a culprit in a lot of these slow back up issues. I used Sophos. I went into preferences and turned of "live protection", and the backup speed immediately started going much faster.