Time Machine extremely slow on Mavericks ?

I will admit that TM is the least of my backups, I rely on CCC for emergencies, and my offsite data backup takes care of the history aspect (up to 5 previous versions of al datal files) TM is there in case neither of my alternatives can provide what I require. That has not happened yet but I will still keep TM in the loop. TM speed is of no concern to me, it's a background process and I ignore it until I need it.

Suggestions for TM enhancements should be submitted to Apple via http://www.apple.com/feedback

Those are great ideas, but Apple needs to see them through official channels.

As for TM not working or too slow, I have noticed that the best way to use it is via directly attached storage, not via wifi, especially in areas where there are many wifi routers (i.e., channel conflicts).

Yes, good point, WiFi connections are significantly slower than direct connections, (or even network connections) with a cable.

I earn my living doing backups, not with TM. I have been doing that for at least the past 20 years and when I see an ongoing problem like what some are reporting with TM here in this thread, I gotta ask, what are the components involved, including the network? Where is the bottleneck? Since some of the people (maybe most) are savy with working in Mac OS X's terminal environment, here is a suggestion for you ..

Find a large-ish file (any file), say around 1GB (for a reasonably good test).

Identify the location of that file within the Mac OS X file system, call this file "test_file1"

Open a terminal window

Within the terminal window, issue a command sequence along the lines of

time cp test_file1 test2_file

where "test2_file" is the name and path to the destination file on the target backup device. After Mac OS X completes copying that file, note the time it took. Then note the total size of the disk volume you have set up TM to back up. Do the math. This will give you a rough idea of how long you can expect TM to back up your entire disk volume.

A couple of years ago, at home on a rainy Saturday, I did this testing to a disk that was connected directly via my Mac via a USB 2 cable, a FireWire 800 cable, and wifi. Wifi yielded by far the slowest results. Even lowly USB 2 was something like 3 x as fast and FireWire 800 was something like 5x as fast, as I recall.

I don't use WiFi to backup, but thanks anyhow.

Good point - I will put in a note to apple next.

For slowness - I have tried it both via USB2 and via Firewire the problem is simply THERE. I have tried different disks - the ones that was being used when the slowdown first occured, stayed slow - others (newer and older) are slow. I have shut down wifi when doing the initial sync - no good. I have changed out different USB cables or Firewire cables - no good. I have moved off of a USB hub - no good.

From the standpoint of peripheral hardware or connectors - I can't think of anything else - I'm guessing that there must be an algorithm somewhere that is causing this.

gfishchman, What happens when you simply try to copy (duplicate) a large file to the same directory where it is located? How about moving that same file to another disk (on another computer)? It might be that your source disk has some corruption or there's a problem with the bus its attached to.

Copying a large (10MB and bigger) file to another location on disk doesn't seem to be a problem.

Copying a file to another disk directly connected to the computer doesn't seem to be a problem

Copying to a wifi disk (mycloud - inside my LAN) is expectedly slow, but not THAT slow.

Backing up via CCC is slow, but not horrible (approximately 50 GB/hr) via USB

At this very point, I have a disk that is having difficulties (will replace the internal HDD (one of the new SSD buffered HDDs) on Monday) and am running from a USB2 drive currently. For fun attempted to run a -TM- backup off of the USB2 drive (a seagate) - same problem as I have seen for many a month (I believe this started up when I switched to MacOS10.9). Will probably try a -TM- backup with the new HDD installed.

gfischman wrote:

Copying a large (10MB and bigger)

Try 1GB, 10MB is not even slightly large.

Thanks - I'll try that CSound - but that'll take time because I'll have to find one or create one - and that is a little outside of my need to do right now box.

As you wish 🙂 it's not the current priority anyhow.

Thank you

I very much appreciate the help - it gets me thinking and we will eventually solve the problem. I thank you for your time Csound1!

You're welcome.

And thank you as well Stanley Horwitz

I have an early 2008 iMac. When I first switched to Mavericks, backups on my Time Machine were slow, but they did eventually happen. Now, just a few days ago, they stall indefinitely. I get a message in Time Machine system preferences window that reads something like: "Backing up: 18.8 MB of 7.12 GB" But there the process stops.

I downloaded the TM Buddy (or whatever it's called) widget. Here is what I copied from it:

Property list invalid for format: 200 (property lists cannot contain NULL)

Property list invalid for format: 200 (property lists cannot contain NULL)

Property list invalid for format: 200 (property lists cannot contain NULL)

Starting manual backup

Attempting to mount network destination URL: afp://Steven%20Savitt@Time%20Capsule%202._afpovertcp._tcp.local/Data

Mounted network destination at mount point: /Volumes/Data-1 using URL: afp://Steven%20Savitt@Time%20Capsule%202._afpovertcp._tcp.local/Data

Disk image /Volumes/Data-1/Steven Savitt’s iMac.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups

Backing up to /dev/disk3s2: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb

Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Macintosh HD

Deep event scan at path:/ reason:must scan subdirs|new event db|

Finished scan

Not using file event preflight for Macintosh HD

Found 29937 files (6.47 GB) needing backup

9.69 GB required (including padding), 1.6 TB available

Can anyone tell me what this means and what, if anything, I can do to get backing up going again?