Time Machine extremely slow on Mavericks ?

My suspicion is that Mavericks introduced a major incompatability with Apple's own USB-to-ethernet adapter. Backups to Time Capsule via MacBook Air over ethernet were ridiculously slow whereas the same backup executed over WiFi executed within minutes.

The problem was solved by using a Thunderbolt-to-ethernet adapter instead instead of the USB adapter.

Guys,

I found the issue... finally! The ExFat format is the issue.

My external drive on which I have my Time Machine is made of 3 partitions: 1 for Time Machine, 2 for personal folders. The personal folders are in ExFat.

THE FIX

Unmount any ExFat partition prior running Time Machine.

It took 1 min to save 3 GB when it used to take F.O.R.E.V.E.R. to have 1 MB completed...

Hope it help. 😉

Hi,

it really seems, it has something to do with the HDD format. I chose provided the wrong format: Mac OS Extended (Case-sentive, journaled), in my case. Set back to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) solved the Problem. After that the whole backup (200 GB) was done in 1 h on an USB 3.0 Drive.

I hope it helps someone else

Regards

Tobias

Mine was already set to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). The issue occurred after upgrading to Mavericks. Stil backing up 100+ GB every night 😟

The only thing that worked for me was a complete erase of the operating system and reinstall and then MANUALLY moving files over from the backup drive. My backups are really fast now.

You know what would be really help here... if someone from Apple tech support actually participated in this forum. This really is a question of Apple expecting the users to iron out their bugs.

There have been so many possible solutions proposed by various kind folk here. The simple truth though it that everyone is having different problems... are you connecting via network cable, network over thunderbolt, wifi or USB - all these scenarios potentially have different problems.

I've tried them all, with multiple versions of OSX and multiple machines. I bought my time capsule about 4 years ago, I couldn't get it to work then. Thought I'd give it another try, having forgotten how much this irritated me back then and in the hope there had been some progress in the last 4 years.

My solution would be to read up on rsync and write a shell script to do the backup, then setup a cron job to fire the script every 30 mins. Save yourself some time and stop reading from this place!!

These forumns are intended to be user-to-user, without any interference by Apple personnel. The best way to engage anyone from Apple in a discussion regarding a particular problem with any of their products is to open an official bug report. You can do that via http://www.apple.com/feedback

The rsync solution won't work with Apple MacOSX. I wrote rsync backup utilities for myself on Linux, and they work great. But Apple disabled the key switch in rsync that allows file access by inode (the disk address, not the file name). Without that, incremental backups cannot work. They also did not include "rename", a standard Linux file renaming program (used to keep folder names keyed with dates). I tried everything to get around the Apple deletions, but could not. I did install Fedora Linux as an application, and the rsync and rename functions, along with my backup programs work just fine, but only under Linux. Time Machine obviously gets around that, and I suspect that Apple has special versions of rsync and rename executables just for Time Machine.

Good idea, but it seems that Apple specifically does not want their users to use these functions in Mac OSX.

Ahh that *****... I was going to spend some time on this - so thanks for the heads up!

I wonder... perhaps if I mount a shared folder (home folder) from the mac into my Ubuntu machine, then get it to run the rsync to a network drive? Do you think that would work or perhaps this inode would still be blocked?

I am a big fan of not reinventing the wheel, so why not use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper for your Mac OS X backups?

Using CCC has been my solutions. It is reasonably fast and since I can schedule the backups - it runs when my activity is down.

There seem to me to be positives and negatives both ways:

CCC - I can really schedule the backup at my convenience within the application.

TM - It is very easy to find an older version - or older document - that, for some reason, has gone missing.

I would love a product that would do both of those things.

gfischman wrote:

Using CCC has been my solutions. It is reasonably fast and since I can schedule the backups - it runs when my activity is down.

There seem to me to be positives and negatives both ways:

CCC - I can really schedule the backup at my convenience within the application.

TM - It is very easy to find an older version - or older document - that, for some reason, has gone missing.

I would love a product that would do both of those things.

Do both.

That is a reasonable suggestion (were TM running at a reasonable clip).

What I would RATHER have, though, is an app that would be schedulable like CCC that has a TM like structure that could create a TM like UI for retrieval. Using both won't make that happen.

Unfortunately such an app does not exist, TM and CCC are very different things and by definition a clone represents a moment in time, not a history.

I run 3 backup systems, TM, CCC and a completely separate (offsite) realtime data only backup, they all have a place. All are 'hands off' systems (cos I would forget if I had to start one myself)

You are right - and both serve their purposes. I will probably always retain my clone second drive for emergency purposes (which I am running from now as I await a replacement HDD for my MBP) but - TM - has been horribly (HORRIBLY) slow for me.

I would use -TM- in a flash if it would just WORK so that the download timespan for the initial backup were in units lower than hours/GB and the incremental BU were of a reasonable duration (the incremental slowdown was where I started having -TM- problems). I would be even HAPPIER with -TM- if within the app it would give me a scheduling choice so that it would increment every 6 hours or 12 hours as opposed to evey hour.

So while I agree with you about the point to the different applications - the reason that I am using CCC for all my needs rather than just the cloning need is because -TM- isn't working on my computer and therefore is not an option.