Time Machine extremely slow on Mavericks ?

All. Disabling the Idle Time Scan worked for a few backups I then disabled the threat protection and it didn't help so I completely disabled NAV and it started working.

The result, I finally just uninstalled Norton AntiVirus, rebooted and now all is running like a champ on my MBP . All major BU's and incrmental BU's take seconds and minutes -- instead of days and weeks.

I am not sure if NAV is a common thread for everyone who is having this issue or what the conflict on my system was, but I am now back to 100% normal and I am not installing NAV until a true fix is found that is verified by Apple and Norton/Symantec.

I think I fixed my issue. After unchecking "put HDD to sleep when possible" in the energy menu my TM now appears to be working correctly. Also, I have never had consistent luck using Norton anti virus on any PC including Windows. It gets into every system of the PC and can cause all kinds of issues. I recommend never to use this software.

I also Disabled all parts of Norton AntiVirus, and now my Backup is running for only 3 minutes every hour. Except when it needs to do some post-backup thinning ... sometimes that takes an hour because it has to delete some of those HUGE backups that were done erroneously (one 43 MB file was deleted from yesterday).

This was only a temporary fix ... it was problematic again half a day later. The thing that worked was Disabling all parts of Norton AntiVirus. See my post on 11-15-13 at 9:30 pm in response to jefsch

Disabling Idle Scan in NAV Version 12.6, has fixed my enormous, time consuming backup problems. Disabling Idle Scan It is the only change I made on this particular computer.

I have the same problem.

Norton can't be the issue since it was never installed on my computer.

I've tried repairing Permissions, stopping spotlight indexing, adding write permissions for my username on Macintosh HD.

So far no luck, TM is still taking endless hours to backup.

Thank you for your patience!

I've passed it to the concerned team. I will let you know as soon as I have an update on this.

Vineeth

Norton Support

I had a similar problem after updating from ML to Mavericks. After trying everything suggested above without the problem being resolved, I was advised by a very helpful Apple 2nd line technician to re-index Spotlight WITH TM TURNED OFF AND THE TM DISK UNMOUNTED. I had previously exluded the disk, but turning it off and ejecting the disk before re-indexing fixed the problem. To be safe I also ejected all other drives as well.

Spotlight then re-indexed happily, I re-enabled time machine and plugged in the disk and it was all good.

Hope this helps someone.

To Tim Pollard how do you re- index Spotlight

Spotlight – Re-index

Open the spotlight panel in system preferences. Open a finder window and locate you main hard drive. add it to the list of excluded locations under the privacy tab of spotlight. Then use the - button to remove it. that forces Spotlight to re-index.

I got it Thanks to both Eric & Tim It is indexing at present

Another instance of Norton being the culprit... I have seemed to fixed the issue on my MacBook Pro 🙂

Like most here, I tried everything - repairing permissions, restarting Time Capsule, re-indexing Spotlight, changing Privacy settings, deleted plist file, changed Base Station name (per faroutsider), deleted content that was giving mdworker errors, booted in safe mode, etc., etc., etc.

I then followed the advice of others here about removing Norton AntiVirus 12.6. I first started with disabling the Idle Time Scan and rebooted, but that didn't work. I almost was at the point of giving up and turning off Time Machine automatic backups in favor of manual ones, but I then read a couple posts about removing Norton AV entirely. I did a full uninstall and I immediately saw the results. Time Machine "Prepared" in about two minutes, and I have completed two backups after that so far. I am attempting a third backup and I am currently backed up 12GB in 22 minutes. I am on Wi-Fi only to my Time Capsule.

This may not work for everyone (some don't even own Norton), but it so far is working for me. I will post back if anything changes.

Thanks to everyone else who posted all your suggestions.

I'm not sure on which site I saw a reference to spotlight indexes getting corrupted causing problems for TM but it was not just Mavericks. I think it was back on Lion. Same type of problem with the same fix. Luckily I found the solution about 2 days after I loaded Mavericks. They should just issue a reindex patch that just goes in and reindexes and see how many problems get fixed.

Reindexing spotlight: Hard to find in the Apple documenation, but easy to do. Read the second paragraph for re-indexing:

I believe that some of the delay problems are only caused when Spotlight is creating the indexThe solution here is to go to System Prefernces -> Spotlight -> Privacy. This lists the drives and folders that are NOT incluced in Sporlight. The general recommendation is to put all external drives that you don't normally search (e.g., backup drives) on this list; the more on this list, the better the performance (apparently). To select a drive, hit the + button near the lower left, select a drive or folder. It's possible (I don't know as fact) that Spotlight can get stuck indexing and re-indexing your main hard drive.

In case Spotlight on your main drive is corrupted or troublesome, re-index that drive. Apple doesn't make this obvious.... Open Spotlight Privacy (as shown above). Hit the + button, select your main system hard drive and add it to the list excluded drives. Once it's on the list, select your main drive again and press the - button on the lower left. That will remove your main system drive from the list. Spotlight will now re-index your main system drive. Then, most important, leave Time Machine off until your maind hard drive stops making noise. Then turn on Time Machine.

On my system, I run Parallells and have Windows and Linux as applications under MacOS. I excluded the Parallels folder in my Documents folder (which is where Parellels, for some unknown reason, keeps alternate OS images).