Time Machine extremely slow on Mavericks ?

I have this same problem on some machines but not others. I have a 2012 Macbook air with Pegasus RAID on thunderbolt and Time Machine just cruised as normal after upgrade. I have a 2012 iMac with a Drobo 5D over thunderbolt and it is painfully slow even after several successive rounds of backups. It spends a very long time preparing, a very long time actually backing up and a very long time cleaning up afterwards. Each incremental one takes many hours which sort of flies in the face of hourly backups! I have four machines that backup to a usb drive attached to my airport extreme, a mac pro 3,1, a mac mini, a 2013 macbook air, and a 2010 macbook pro. The pros and the mini seem slow and the air seems fine. I decided it might be an issue of going on top of a mountain lion backup so I erase the time machine partition on the Drobo for my imac and started fresh. It has about 280 GB to back up and based on current rate of progress it looks like days or weeks before the initial backup is done.

Given the variability of backup drives, none of which seems to be pushed anywhere near their write data rates, and connectivity (wifi, wired ethernet, thunderbolt) it is hard to see a pattern. I might be inclined to expect some of the power managment stuff in mavericks but then why are some machines just fine??? Maybe Time Machine only works properly on macbook airs.

I backed up to a Drobo on my FW800 connection. the first 330gb backup took over 16 hours. It seemed to pick up speed after about 7 fours or so. The normal hourly backups seem to be working normally.

I tried 3 times unsuccessfuly to back my 15" MacBook Pro Retina, with just installed Mavericks, to an external thunderbolt drive. A 750 Gb backup. All 3 times the backup failed and froze after 14 hours or so; crashing the finder. I went into preferences and trashed the 2 preference files for time machine, verified the disk on my MacBook, and then tried again. About 14 hours later I finally completed the backup (with the transfer hanging on the last few Mb for 2 hours) and then the finder crashed. I restarted and tried another backup; maybe the first backup was OK, but the machine took 23 minutes to back up just 75 Mb to the external drive. And the finder froze for about 15% of that backup time, making it impossible to do work on the machine, during backup. This is not auspicious.

just grab another HD and create a new fresh Time Machine backup

after its complete, I take the original HD with the OLD backup and format/erase it.

problem solved

You can wait a long time to backup after OS Mavericks, or just grab another HD.

Ive done it on several machines.

Same problem here. I've wiped my Time Capsule drive and started a new backup from my iMac, and it's taken about 6 hours to backup 145 GB so far (of 650 GB) via wifi.

Anyone in Apple monitoring these discussions, or do we have to poke them directly?

After the initial lengthly backup mine now seems to be backing up OK. Most backups are just a few minutes. Maybe post back here how yours are doing after you have made a few incremental backups. I would be interested to know if others have the same experience as I did.

My MacBook Pro was taking a long time to backup via Time Machine so I stopped the backup and rebooted just in case. I then began the backup cycle again. It's been running for nearly 11 hours and has backed up 5.74GB of 40GB and says it has 13 hours remaining. My 27" iMac didn't take nearly this long after the Mavericks installation. At least I don't think it did. I wasn't paying as close attention since the iMac just sits connected to the backup drive all the time while the MacBook Pro doesn't. Fortunately it's Saturday and I don't need to do anything with the laptop until Monday.

Time Machine is actually working better/faster on my two Macs since installing Mavericks. I did lose contact between my iMac and Time Capsule once right after Mavericks installation. MacBook Pro came online easily. Now both backup quietly and quickly. I agree with those who have said it takes a few cycles for things to settle down and work better. However, I didn't have hours of initial backup, or need to start over as some have reported here.

Further data points:

Drive is a 2TB Seagate connected via FireWire. I stopped the backup that was running, tried to unmount the drive, which failed, so I wound up physically unplugging from the laptop. After a reboot I reconnected and ran a Disk Util repair, which said the drive was fine. I then copied a 21MB folder to the drive, which took a few minutes, far longer than it should. Just for grins I tried another Time Machine run. After an hour it had backed up 267MB and seemed stuck on trying to calculate remaining time.

All this seems to point to an issue with the FireWire drivers or something else I/O based, rather than something with Time Machine itself, at least in my case.

squelcher

Drive is a 2TB Seagate connected via FireWire.

FIrewire drives are across the board having major issues with Mavericks, avoid same until a fix is issued.

many are reporting same, there is a firewire fault and TB HD on external HD from LaCie (Seagate) and from WD especially.

Technicians are looking into it. 😊

Until there is resolution, consider setting up a USB ext. Time machine HD.

Until then consider confining Mavericks use with USB HD.

Ive tested a long line of USB HD on Mavericks, all seem fine.

As I mentioned here earlier, I have experienced the same problems that the firewire drives' users are having with Mavericks, but with two different Thunderbolt external drives.... so I think the problem must extend to these, too.

hkAntarctica

but with two different Thunderbolt external drives....

Correct, this issue extends to several mfg. of Thunderbolt drives, I confirm same.

Technicians are looking into it. 😊

Until there is resolution, consider setting up a USB ext. Time machine HD.

All my external drives are Seagates. I have avoided WD for a few years as they were having troubles with FW back then. Anyway, my initial 330gb backup took over 16 hours but it was very slow at first and then picked up speed as it went along. Now my backups run just a few minutes and all seems to be working OK. So in my case after the initial slowness things seemed to work themselves out. It might be best if one starts a FW backup to just let it run for awhile to see if that works before switching to USB.

Just this morning a 700mb backup took just a few minutes. That is about the same as I have been getting all along even before installing Mavericks.

a New OS throws Time Machine too much of a loop and makes backups a snails crawl.

I dont have the time for 15+ hours of a backup. I just grabbed another HD and made a fresh new backup complete, only took 40 mins. or less. 😊

Ultimately I only put high trust in HD clones and archives.

I erased & reformatted w Disk Utility the firewire Backup partition, and started over. It took four hours to backup in Mavericks, but it did backup. Are you sure you needed a new drive? Or maybe I miss-understand. Sorry if so.