Time Machine extremely slow on Mavericks ?

Hi elenchus,

Yes, you rename the base station. Open Airport Utility, click on the Time Capsule drive, then click edit. On the first screen, change the base station name (I just added a 1 to my existing base station name). (I'm sure you know this, but I'm enumerating all the steps for others). Click update and the base station resets. Then reboot the Mac (step 3) and continue with steps 4 and 5.

The very helpful advisor at Apple assured me that the TC would recognise the existing sparse bundle, which certainly seems to be the case - my wife's backup, which has been working fine since the Mavericks upgrade, is still working without a hitch after I re-assigned TM on her Mac to the renamed base station.

I have not had to rename the wireless network name, just the base station name.

I don't think you need to use your old plist - rather delete it to completely reset the TC settings. Once you reboot and assign the renamed base station, the backup runs as it should... Certainly seems to be working for me - five hours to backup 380 GB so far, and telling me about 3 hours to backup the remaining 290 GB.

Hope this helps.

faroutsider's advice seems to be working for me. Since I don't use Time Capsule I just renamed the actual backup partition after removing the plist (and a lockfile for the plist with a date from July 2011, which seemed odd to me). I'm getting data transfer rates many times what I was getting over the weekend and in under 5 minutes I've already backed up more data than I was able to do in 13 hours a few days ago.

I'll keep my fingers crossed. TM says 7 hours remaining for a full backup. Hopefully that's accurate enough even though it's still a long time to back up 270GB.

RESULT!

After struggling for a week to get a completed backup (and re-starting the process 3 times), TM is now backing up as it was before I upgraded to Mavericks - 670 GB took under 8 hours to backup to Time Capsule, and is currently backing up to USB at a reasonable rate (estimate has already dropped from 15 hours to 11 hours).

To summarise (I'm going to be a bit pedantic here, please bear with me):

1. Delete the file Macintosh HD/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist

Go to Finder, click Go, click Computer, click on Macintosh HD (or whatever your primary HD is called), click on Library, scroll down to Preferences, scroll down to com.apple.TimeMachine.plist, right click on the file and select Move to trash.

2. Rename your base station (Time Capsule) or backup HD.

To rename the base station, click on Spotlight (magnifying glass on top right of Apple menu bar) and type Airport Utility. In the Airport Utility window, click on the Time Capsule drive, and on the popup window click edit. In the window that opens, in the first tab (Base Station) click on the base station name and rename it (for example, I changed the name from Time Capsule Backup to Time Capsule Backup 1). Click update, and the base station resets. You do not have to change any other settings (e.g. internet, wireless).

To rename an internal or external drive, click on the name under the drive icon on the desktop, wait a second, then click again and the rounded "balloon" changes to a light blue rectangle. Type in the new name (for example, I changed the name from Backup to USB Backup).

3. Restart the Mac.

This is important!

4. Once the Mac has rebooted, open System Preferences (you can do this from Spotlight) and click on Time Machine. Click Select Disk and make sure you select the renamed disc from step 2. Click Use Disk, then click Replace "[Old Disk Name]". If you are using Time Capsule, you may have to type your wireless network password to connect to the disk.

5. Run the backup.

If you have previous backups on the disk, TM will recognise your Mac and will continue to use the existing backups. I you had previously wiped your backups, as I had, in an attempt to speed up the backup process under Mavericks, the backup should now proceed as normal (about 70-90 GB/hour).

I've borrowed an HDD to create a backup for a Mac migration and reformating it wasn't an option. I've solved this by disabling the Spotlight indexing on the external HDD which IMO should happen automatically (TC backups should not be indexed in the first place). I think this might be a bug in Mavericks.

To disable Spotlight on particular drive, go to Spotlight preferences -> Privacy and add a drive there. After that I've killed all mdworker processes (one took up to 90% CPU time) and then the backup speed increased.

Is there a way to fix this problem without renaming the backup drive? I am backing up on a company NAS, I don't think they will allow me to rename it...

Thanks faroutsider. Basically followed your instructions which solved the problem.

I am backing up to a WD MyCloud. First time round I didn't delete the existing backup and when I started TimeMachine it seemed to be taking an age to prepare the backup (obviously looking at the previous version). I stopped TimeMachine and tried to delete the file but this was also taking ages. In the end I did a factory restore of the drive (there was not much else on it) and restarted TimeMachine. It is now working normally and backing up at normal speed (estimate 8 hours for around 450Gb).

I realise when upgrading the OS the first TimeMachine backup will be slow but it was looking like taking 3 or 4 days so there must be an issue which I imagine Apple will sort with a point release.

Sadly my backup issues have not been resolved as hoped. When I got up this morning, instead of a completed backup I found Time Machine had made it through 30GB and estimated it would take another 13 hours. Data transfer rates were peaking around 40kb/s. Back to the drawing board...

Unfortunately, this procedure of removing Time Machine .plist, renaming backup volume, and rebooting did not help my installation on a new MacBook Pro 13" retina. Took 9 hours to backup 42GB, and this was not the initial backup. 😠

Maybe the issue is partly down to a problem with TimeMachine trying to backup Mavericks over a previous OS version backup that is contributing to the slow speeds. I think that both myself and faroutsider deleted the previous backup. Obviously not good practice if that is your only backup copy!

I would understand if this was only on the initial backup after installing Mavericks. This is occurring on subsequent backups though.

@iZac100: Afraid not. My backups are slow after a clean install of Mavericks to a reformatted partition, backing up to a reformatted Time Machine partition. Also, the initial backup was quick, but the incrementals are slow.

My SOS Online Backup is also freezing up and unusable. I got one good backup after the reformat, but now I just get the spinning beach ball when it tries to run. I have to wonder if it has the same root cause as the Time Machine problem. Their website now says they don't support Macs although they updated their Mac client just a few months ago.

Update: my iMac backup is now running very smoothly, but I had the same performance issues backing up my MacBook Pro. So I called the Apple Care Helpline again and got through to a senior advisor, who told me to delete the com.apple.TimeMachine.plist.lockfile as well as com.apple.TimeMachine.plist, then reboot and try again. This seems to have worked - a backup that was estimated to take 15 hours before I deleted these files completed in less than 3 hours (170 GB).

@woezelmann, this procedure worked without renaming the HDD, so maybe just try deleting both files listed above, rebooting and restarting the backup.

@iZac100, my wife's backup under Mavericks is working perfectly over a 10.8.5 backup. In fact, her backup worked without a hitch from the outset when I installed the Mavericks upgrade.

Unfortunately, I just checked and my system does not have a file named: com.apple.TimeMachine.plist.lockfile

I deleted the com.apple.TimeMachine.plist file previously after doing an intial backup and the subsquent backup still took 9 hours for 42GB.

Well, it doesn't get better... Just did an incremental backup before leaving work for the day. 22MB took 11 minutes. At that rate, 1GB would take over 8 hours... something is not right... it appears to be getting worse. BTW, using a WD Essentials external drive, USB 2.0. Even it shouldn't be that slow.