Mac OS X 10.8.4's Time Machine is taking a long time to back up...

Finally, it finished. I saw it go under a GB free too! It backed up over 15 GB of data! It did tell me it had to delete the first few snapshots up to October 2012. Will this happen again for the next one due to low free disk space? If so, then is there a way to just go ahead and delete a lot of snapshots to make plenty of free disk spaces to go faster? That took way too long. 😟

It will happen any time the disk is too full for a new backup. (And note that the backup disk doesn't need anywhere near as much free space as your internal HD does. It can get very near full without a problem.)

How long it will take depends on several things, but mostly the size of the new backup. If only one or two old backups have to be deleted, it shouldn't take more than a few extra minutes. If many do, or if there's a problem deleting the old one(s), it can take quite a while.

The easy way to tell what happened is to look at the log messages -- the sizes and every deletion are documented there. Use the widget in #A2 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting to see them. If in doubt, copy and post them here.

It's also possible that your TM disk is slowing down due to age, and/or beginning to fail. 😟

If so, then is there a way to just go ahead and delete a lot of snapshots to make plenty of free disk spaces to go faster? That took way too long. 😟

There is, but there's no particular reason to do so, at least not yet.

Thanks. I will look at this later. I know weekly back ups vary from a few hundred MBs to a 1 GB. Yesterday was weird. Up to 15 GB (kept growing slowly during the long TM backup) and free disk space went down slowly (had about 5? GB free to under 900 MB (didn't watch the whole thing).

Pondini wrote:

antdude wrote:

. . .

Will this happen again for the next one due to low free disk space?

It will happen any time the disk is too full for a new backup. (And note that the backup disk doesn't need anywhere near as much free space as your internal HD does. It can get very near full without a problem.)

How long it will take depends on several things, but mostly the size of the new backup. If only one or two old backups have to be deleted, it shouldn't take more than a few extra minutes. If many do, or if there's a problem deleting the old one(s), it can take quite a while.

The easy way to tell what happened is to look at the log messages -- the sizes and every deletion are documented there. Use the widget in #A2 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting to see them. If in doubt, copy and post them here.

It's also possible that your TM disk is slowing down due to age, and/or beginning to fail. 😟

If so, then is there a way to just go ahead and delete a lot of snapshots to make plenty of free disk spaces to go faster? That took way too long. 😟

There is, but there's no particular reason to do so, at least not yet.

I tried another weekly TM backup today, and it was short even though there was low free disk space. I took screen shots/captures and compared with TimeTracker (cool tool) from last week's very long backup (says it was about 13.3 GB big!): http://i.imgur.com/HIA6brx.gif ... It was interesting to see some were really big, but I don't remember them taking forever to finish. Another interesting was after today's weekly back up, I checked again to compare again with today's weekly backup, some snapshots went to zero/0 bytes. What the heck? Is that normal?

Pondini wrote:

antdude wrote:

. . .

I tried another weekly TM backup today, and it was short even though there was low free disk space. I took screen shots/captures and compared with TimeTracker (cool tool) from last week's very long backup (says it was about 13.3 GB big!): http://i.imgur.com/HIA6brx.gif ... It was interesting to see some were really big, but I don't remember them taking forever to finish.

Take a look at the contents -- it looks like you did an OSX update before that backup, since several apps are listed. There's probably a lot in Library and System, too. That would, of course, cause a large backup.

Another useful tool is the widget in #A1 ofTime Machine - Troubleshooting. It extracts the backup messages from your recent logs, so you can see how much was backed-up, which backups were deleted, etc. It also shows the total elapsed time in the header area.

(p.s., I love the name of your TM drive!)

Another interesting was after today's weekly back up, I checked again to compare again with today's weekly backup, some snapshots went to zero/0 bytes. What the heck? Is that normal?

That just means TimeTracker hasn't indexed them yet -- by default, it doesn't do so until you select one, but there is a preference that I think will load them all in the background. If you don't use it a lot, that may waste a lot of CPU time, as it may index backups that just get deleted after 24 hours.

Hmm, I don't remember the update (check for updates once a week) being huge. It wasn't like 10.8.x to the latest 10.8.x. I know my client (not my MBP) uses iPhoto a lot. Hmm, I only remember seeing clear caches in TimeTracker. Is this it? I did try exiting TimeTracker, unmounting and disconnecting external HDD, reconnecting it and restarting TimeTracker. I did not see it reread the drives. I know it did when I first used the program.

I gave that amusing HDD name because he is a computer newbie. 😉 There's a 250 GB FAT32 partition drive to keep files in it so he can use it on any computers including Windows.

Speaking of logs, I didn't even see a specific TimeMachine category. I do remember seeing files copied in system.log or something as shown in your #A1 link. Nothing weird in it though like errors. I will check again if the problem returns. Let's see what happens next week!