Time Machine extremely slow on Mavericks ?

Hello,

I am Vineeth and I am from the Norton Support team.

Thank you for your feedback! I can certainly pass this to the concerned team. However, I don't see these problems reported with the latest version. Can you please let me know the version of your Norton product?

Thanks!

Vineeth

Disabling Norton Idle-time Scan worked for me and returned the TM backup to normal speed.

OSX 10.9

Noton IS5 for Mac 12.6 (26)

2.2 GHz Intel Core i7

8GB 1333 MHz DDR3

to Vineeth at the Norton support team

Norton Internet Security 5 for Mac

v 5.6 (47)

early 2013 MacBook Pro Retina

OS X 10.9

if idle scan is running

it does not matter what external drive I use for attempted TM backup

it’s either glacially slow or just freezes hour to back up a few Mb

to Vineeth at the Norton support team

Four separate machines backing up to external USB\FireWire or Thunderbolt drives

2013 27" iMac with Fusion drive

2011 27" iMac

2012 15" MBP Retina

2010 17" MBP

All using

Norton Internet Security 5 for Mac

v 5.6 (47)

Norton AV - 12.6 (26)

All Norton updates are applied via LiveUpdate

OS X 10.9

All Macs displayed this issue and switching off Idle Scan immediately addressed it. I'm more than a little surprised that you haven't seen it, particularly as it's flagged on your own community site.

Same goes for me. Once I disabled the Norton idle scan and rebooted, TM seems to be working normally. It did require a lengthy clean up process, but not incremental BU's are normal and quick.

I am still having issues with my MBP recognizing the drive as a TM drive after restarting and have to manually select the drive every day to get it to backup properly.

MacBook Pro Retina 15-inch

2.8 GHz Intel Core i7

16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB

OS X 10.9 (13A603)

Norton AV 12.6

Me too. Norton Anti Virus 12.6, iMac mid 2010, 12 GB memory, Mavericks. No significant problems before Mavericks. After Mavericks, Time Machine completely unusable until automatic idle time scan disabled.

Hello DButdorf, hkAntarctica, the original macman, jefsch, & alaz0,

Thank you for the valuable information! Let me report it to the concerned team and see whether they require more information such as log files, dump etc.

Thanks!

Vineeth

Norton Support

The Norton idle scan setting seemed to be the secret. I was close to restoring to 10.8 when I started reading this thread.

-Imac 2.7 Ghz Intel Core i5 Mid 2011 iMac

-Norton Antivirus v12.6(26)

1) I excluded all user accounts (via Privacy settings) on Spoltight

2) Deleted the .Spotlight contents

3) I switched the WD external disk to the USB 2.0 port.

4) Stopped the backup from happening while indexing was going

5) After the first indexing tranche completed, I force a backup

6) Ever day or so, I would remove another user account from privacy

7) Turned off idle scan and disabled the energy savings (Pu hard disks to sleep when possible)

8) I now have the hourly backups running in minutes

9) The spotlight indexing is more ordered

10) Switched the external disk cable to FW800

11) Working like from the old days!

Glad to help where I can.

Just an update on my current situation. When TM started backing up earlier this evening, even with idle scan off, it was going very slow and at times seemed to freeze. I disabled Norton Antivirus protection and Venerabiltiy protection and immediately TM jumped to normal.

For the time being, I am uninstalling Norton Antivirus until a fix from either Norton or Apple is found.

For a while turning of Nortan idle scan fixed TM. However, after a couple of days of good backups (the first two took a while after disabling Norton but fast after that) TM is no longer working on my 12 iMac with a thunderbolt Drobo. It totally stops, not just slow. I reformatted the drive and it starts the first backup going great to 1.02 GB then progress stops. I switched to a FW800 drive and get exactly the same behavior, although it does seems to be going in fits and starts. So far my other macs which backup to a usb drive connected to airport extreme are still going OK.

I just did my second ML to Mavericks upgrade on a 2012 Mini. TM was quick to run and continues to run perfectly. Very fast. I have very little third party APPS so I would guess others that are having issues may be related to some incomparable software. I tired TM first by connecting a clean HDD using SATA to USB3 cable which worked fine. Then I installed the drive in a Macally HDD enclosure also USB3 and it runs fine. The other Mini is connected via FW800 and also works fine (although a little slower than USB3 unit). One HDD is WD 1TB blue the other HGST 1TB. Both work great.

People, this is crazy... Thirteen pages of discussion and attempts at putting things right in this thread alone...

... and the ONE thing we all have in common? EVERYTHING WAS FINE BEFORE WE INSTALLED MAVERICKS!!!!!!

Across all the versions of OSX we upgraded from, across all kinds of iMachines, hardware configurations and and all kinds of backup TM discs, across various anti-virus/firewall software or none whatsoever...

I'M THINKING IT'S A MAVERICKS THING, OR..............??????????????!!!!!!! 😮 😠😉 *rolls eyes*

Parodoxatplay, you are absolutely right. I'v been following this ever since I first posted my version of the problem. "EVERYTHING WAS FINE BEFORE WE INSTALLED MAVERICKS!!!!!!" can sum up all 13 pages of it. Time Machine is such an important part of OS X. People are being forced to delete backups and start fresh, change hardddrives and look into alternatives. The only solution here is for Apple to release a fix. But what would really help for now is if Apple just dropped a quick "It's not you, it's us."

I guess my working system did not last long. After 24 hours of TM working correctly it started to "prepare backup" and said this for 2 hours. I tried to enter TM and no files. So I shut TM down, restarted and now files show and TM has started up again. This is the USB3 drive. I will see what happens on my other Mac that is using FW800 drive. Never had this issue with ML.

Yesterday I rebooted my iMac (late2009) using Command-R and did a Repair Disk Permissions and Repair Disk on my boot disk. Afterwards, Backup worked fast and fine and Spotlight stopped reindexing endlessly, but the Cleanup after backup did not comlete. Last night I again used Command-R on reboot and did a Repair Disk on my MyBook destination drive. This morning I just completed a backup in 4 minutes and the clean up took only 14 minutes. I don't know if this will continue or not, but just the fact that Spotlight is not constantly and endlessly reindexing solves 90% of my problems.