Time Machine extremely slow on Mavericks ?

I dont want to use icloud because i don't trust it (Apple giving away all that data to the NSA)

I guess I am yet ANOTHER very dissapointed customer with a company that I really have loved. Just bought a time capsule and love the easy setup for network and the great speeds but...backup is ridiculous... getting about 1Gb per hour backup speed and I've spoken to 4 seperate apple care people, The first 3 at least acknowledged the problem, but the last tried to argue that this was normal . NORMAL??? ...please. It's insulting to hear arguments that transfer speeds of 600Kbs are normal. And all the hoops I was required to go thru.. same as above with indexing, cable swaps,etc. "Gee maybe its your cable" ... but my network speed is 30Mb/s over my same ethernet cable.

Very disturbing! Apple - acknowledge the problem and get to work fixing it - please.

same problem for Mavericks on timemachine.

called the hotline but the hotline said there are no issues for other users on Mavericks!

but here i saw a lot ppl having same problem.

please acknowledge the problem and do something to fix it.

i am very worried about the data without backup these days...

I had a lengthy discussion with Apple Tech support about this problem. This is an issue that their engineers are investigating. They have mixed user reports; not all users have this problem. As in this forum, virus protection and Western Digital drive seem to be among the most common, but not unique, related software/hardware items. They do not have a defined release date for the next Mavericks update yet. Based on my conversation with Apple, this and related forums, and my own experience (I did get Time Machine working stably), I have the following observations and suggestions:

1. I had all the problems listed in this forum, but Time Machine has been working properly and stably for me under Mavericks now, on one machine.

2. There is a Western Digital Smartware potential issue. I would consider removing Smartware. In my system, Smartware is still running after all the messing around that I did, but Time Machine is working well now. So, Smartware may or may not be the problem. Western Digital has Smartware uninstall programs.

3. There is a new release of Western Digital Drive Manager, and I would install that. I use Western Digital Studio II RAID drives, and I need the WD Drive Manager. I recommend that you install the Drive Manager if it's used for your drives (it might only apply to RAID drives, I don't know.)

4. If you have anti-virus software, either disable the whole thing, or at the least, turn off any background scanning (e.g., idle time scanning) that it does.

5. When upgrading to Mavericks, Spotlight turns on and starts building its index. So, turn off Time Machine until your internal hard drive stops making all the read/write noises. It may take a few hours or days. Let Spot light finish. Go to System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy, and exclude all your external backup drives. You might want to exclude all your external drives for now -- put the non-backup ones back in after all the stuff below is done.

6. The next steps really need your patience -- once Time Machine starts to build or rebuild its databases, let it finish, even if it takes hours or days. Any failure of Time Machine, whether it be a time out, disk access conflict with other programs, or impatience (i.e., force quit and try something different), will cause delays to mount.

7. The "plist" files, noted earlier in this thread, are Macintosh HD -> Library -> com.apple.TimeMachine.plist* (there are two files), contain the Time Machine database file lists. These may be a part of the problem. Put both in your trash (but save them just in case you'll need them again, but you probably won't).

8. Turn on Time Machine, and re-select your drive, don't use the drive already listed -- even if it's the same drive; reselect that drive, and run Time Machine. Time Machine will build a new full backup "plist" file, and it will take time. Let it finish. Mine took two days. The next time Time Machine will turn on, it will begin building/rebuilding the incremental backup file lists. This also will take time, but probably not as long as the initial Time Machine list that you just built.

9. If this is the right solution, Time Machine will now (on the third backup) begin to work properly under Mavericks. After a lot of reading and writing all over user forums, I believe this is what worked for me. My guess is, some parts of it are not necessary, but I don't have a clue which ones. But this combination will work around known multiple programs accessing your disk heavily, and Time Machine database problems.

I think, but am not sure, that the suggestions to reformat Time Machine drives are a draconian solution to deleting the plist files and letting Time Machine rebuild them. If true, the advantage of the latter is that your existing Time Machine backups are preserved.

If this does not work, I'm out of ideas. But I do know that Apple engineers are working this problem, and I'm hopeful that they will include some level of solutions in the next Mavericks release -- whenever that will be. I have two other Macs to update, but am not certain enough of these solutions to attempt updating them until after at least one, probably two, Mavericks update releases occur.

For what it's worth. Good luck! - Andy

The rational behind my suggested solution, is that all three issues that come up: Time Machine, anti-virus, Spotlight all build disk-wide databases of their own. With the hundreds of thousands or millions of files that todahy's hard disks have, that places a huge demand on disk I/O. Run them all at the same time, and crashes are inevitable. This solution takes them on one at a time, until all three are built. Once built, they are used primarily for reading only, and the system as a whole will work.

This is good info. Thanks for posting it.

I have to say though, I'm skeptical that the problem is specific to those running virus checkers and using WD drives. I don't run a virus checker and my target backup device is an Apple Time Capsule, yet I experienced this same problem on both my iMac and MBA.

As mentioned in my post above, forcing the MBA to backup over wireless instead of Ethernet solved the problem. And yes, I did rule out the cable and NIC as being a contributing factor.

I guess what I'm saying is that Mavericks has a fundamanetal flaw in the I/O system that's causing this. It's not limited to a particular drive-type. What's *triggering* that I/O flaw is unknown.

Good points. Maybe a better way to look at this is that it is an I/O managment system problem. Probably because it isn't regulating the hard disk calls, and when there are too many, it's free for all. I remember that you noted that Time Capsule has the same issue, and others have raised other drive manufacturers too. What would trigger the I/O problem is a lot of small file calls to the disk, from several places -- that would overlead the I/O circuitry on the hard disk board, and so not show up in the activity monitor. But, as everything goes through the hard disk, especially if it uses the hard disk for spare memory, the hard disk might not keep up with the rest of the computer. In the old days, maybe even today, Microsoft would not tell you that you have a disk problem until a given read fails 50 consequtive time. (Of course, they could have told you much earlier that you had an incipient problem, but this way, you could be persuaded to buy a new system, with a new OS, and more money is made.) I'm still guessing I/O overload to the internal hard disk when Mavericks first is installed -- and that comes from two main places: Time Machine and Spotlight. I tend to agree with you, hard disk manufacturer issues are probably secondary.

Your wireless solution I found interesting, and still can't figure out -- it is not consistent with the I/O overload hypothesis. Unless your ethernet is going bad -- on my wife's late 2009 iMac, that is a known problem. That hypothesis is that at that time, Apple switched to lead-free solder, for environment's sake, but lead-free solder connections are not as reliable. In her case, we had to swap out a systme board for a lot of money. After 2009, Apple put the ethernet on its own board, which makes replacement a lot easier. Anyway, in her case, she had to go wireless or replace very expensive pieces. This may be an unrelated problem?

Interesting hypothesis. One user commented that it was necessary to backup wirelessly instead of over an Ethernet cable in order to be successful . Perhaps this slowed down the the data transfer and protocol exchange rate just enough. In my case, I am running Norton Internet Security with Idle-time scan disabled in order to be successful with Time Machine backups. Of course, Time Machine is also successful if Virus Protection is disabled but I do not run my system in that mode.

I have a 2.8GHz Core I7 with 12Meg of RAM. I am wondering if this issue is more lilely to show in older Macs where some newly introduced race condition can only be masked by faster systems.

This certainly is perplexing in the variety of presentations of the problems with Time Machine. I had the problem with my 2011 iMac and 2011 MBP, which were both sorted by deleting the plist files (see my posts on pp 6-7 of this thread), but my wife's ealier system (early 2008 iMac) had no problems at all with the upgrade to Mavericks, either to the same Time Capsule used by both my computers, or to the USB drive attached to the iMac. So it seems that age of the system is not necessarily the precipitating factor. Also, the problem resolved on my systems without making any changes to Norton, and I'm not using WD drives.

well. i am using SEGATE drive on USB without any antivirus software.

i dont think it is related to anti virus or protocal problem.

i really suspect spotlight indexing problem...

I agree with Chiuto. I'm reindexing the system harddrive and it is taking more than 2 days already. Something is wrong.

Hello,

large problems also exist with the presentation of the contents of the hard disk. When I look at the bar chart of the disk, the breakdown of the hard drive is no longer correct. I do not have 75 GB app on the computer and 7GB other. Maybe it's the problem with the Time Machine. Every time I start a new backup, 72 GB are backed up. That can not be. Also, the process of backup is very slow again. Perhaps the context of slow Time Machine with an erroneous calculation of the hard drive. Open "about this Mac" then "more information" and then "disk". There you'll see the bar graph, which is not shown correctly.

Does anyone have the same problem?

google translate from German to English. Hope you understands it.

I was just having the same problem with very slow backup to Time Machine. I noted that activity monitor now has a pane showning "energy" with a column showing "energy impact" and "average energy impact". Spotlight and Time Machine were often the top contenders with Spotlight having much higher energy impact than Time Machine. And the average column (since I started the backup several hours ago) showed Spotlight using about 20x the energy of Time Machine. So I went into System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results tab and unchecked all boxes, then to the Privacy tab and added all my drives (including the backup drive and my main disk) and all the top level folders as to be excluded from Spotlight indexing. This made a big difference in the energy impact column of the activity monitor with about equal impact for Time Machine and Spotlight (both usually at the top of the impact column). Also, I could visibly see the backup progress, and decrease in the extimated backup time remaining in the Time Machine display of System Preferences. I wonder if Apple could just put in a temporary "disable spotlight" switch while doing backups...

On the “slow time machine backups” indications are that extremely slow Time Machine backups (witnessed same myself on many occasions on several machines)

fsck_hfs -- HFS file system consistency check, or first form fsck, is running too long (premise)

this from reports appears to be running:

fsck_hfs -f /dev/disk….

-f When used with the -p option, force fsck_hfs to check `clean' file systems, otherwise it means force fsck_hfs to check and repair journaled HFS+ file systems.

-S Cause fsck_hfs to scan the entire drive looking for I/O errors. It will attempt to map the blocks with errors to names, similar to the -B option.

Fsck for Mac OS X version 10.9

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/ man8/fsck.8.html#//apple_ref/doc/man/8/fsck

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/ man8/fsck_hfs.8.html

RESOLVED FOR ME

I have got WD elements 2'5 / 2 Tb usb2 for back up. When i started It was extremly slowly. According Activity monitor read/write was 0,5-1,5Mb per sec. I just swiched off spotlighte for the external HDD ( privent spotlighte from searching this location / in the privacy section spotlight of the preferencies ). From time to time speed are going to down, but usualy keep 25 -40 Mb/ sec around.