Q: Time Machine extremely slow on Mavericks ?

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.

faroutsider, thank's for your detailed answer. Unfortunately, this did not work for me. Are there any other files you deleted / edited before rebooting and starting the time machine?

Thanks

Hi, i just got an brand new iMac 27" i7 an a upgrade to Mavericks some days ago. My problem is when copy from a Lacie BD XL external drive to my iMac, it takes forever to copy about 7GB from a DVD to my desktop, it is close to an hour with USB2 an a little bit less with firewire,about 5min. save) (firewire to thunderbolt adapter). If i backup a DVD with Handbrake with "low profile" i get about 30fps. With my mid 2012 Macbook Pro i5 i get about 250-275fps.under Moutain Lion Handbrake ver 0.9.9. and same Lacie XL Drive. Then i tried first to copy the 7 GB folder from DVD to my desktop (an Hour) and then convert the folder in Handbrake, now i get stunning 600-650fps. So as i see it, the slow transferspeed is located to Firewire and the USB under OS 10.9 Mavericks.

Had this problem since I upgraded to Mavericks on the first day available.  Multiple chats / calls with Apple Tech Support.  Re-install Mavericks / disk verify / check permissions / re-index Spotlight / re-image backup disk / etc...

Finally got a complete backup - 600GB after 3 days of running after indexing complete.

Now, system continues to index, and backups running extremely slow on iMac (15 hours for 4.2GB).

Do not have plist you mentioned, but do have com.Apple.TMLaunchAgent.plist

Should that file be deleted and the disk renamed?

Hopefully there is an Apple update out soon.

I managed to do a full 700GB backup to USB drive attached to Airport Extreme at an OK speed -- took about a day. This is after following the plist file removal renaming/reformatting the drive, etc. Now incremental updates are at snail speed. I even did plist/lockfile deletion/restart again, selected the same drive and resumed backup with no changes. a 10MB incremental update still takes about 10 minutes.

My conclusion is that there is something wrong with Mavericks/Time Machine and I will patiently wait for Apple to release a fix.

@woodsfortysix and @Almir.R - I agree with both of you - there is a problem with Mavericks and it needs to be fixed asap. I was lucky - three chats and two calls to Apple Care seems to have fixed my problems (with TM and Mavericks, at least...), but the fix is clearly not universal.

@woodfortysix - I don't know if deleting com.Apple.TMLauncherAgent.plist will sort out your problem, or is indeed advisable.

My advice is to call Apple (and refuse to pay the $19 fee - use the "Recently bought OS X" clause) and ask for their senior advisors to help you sort out your individual problems. The more calls they get, the sooner they'll get their engineers to sort out the problems...

"It just works..." Hmmm!

Under Mavericks TM is using a whole lot more space ....

I just did my first backup with TM and backing up 395.2GB used 951.7GB on the TM disk !

How can it do this ? there is only 395GB of files on there ! Now I know they say TM has a 20-25% overhead but this is 240.8% !!!! Ridiculous !

I'd suggest this is why backups seem slow TM is actually backing up a lot MORE data then all the files its saving in a backup. What is it backing up ? This has to be a bug with Mavericks as under Mountain Lion it only used a few GB more then the files being backed up.

NOt really a reply to you drpopper, but I started a new back-up over wifi and after starting it on Friday of last week, I had 160GB of 470Gb in 7 days! The computer was almost useless when trying to do anything on the web.

This is a big problem and Apple needs to fix this. It shouldn't take 4 weeks of constant backing up to do the back up. I canceld it because I have things I have to do and I am trying a direct USB transfer. For the last 20 minutes it hasn't moved...

OK, so after several weeks of incredibly slow backups that never really seem to end I figured I too would reply to this post in hopes that someone from Apple would respond and acknowledge that there is an issue.

The initial backup after upgrading to Mavricks took forever, but that was expected. However, every subsequent backup since also seems to linger forever; even the very small 10MB backups!

I have also noticed that iPhone syncs and backups are slow or never seem to finish since the upgrade. Has anyone else also experienced this?

I have macbook air 2012 mavericks and first tried wifi then went to usb to connect to ethernet and backup is still slow with only 24 GB (out of 440GB) backed up in >24 hours.

...Add me to the list of people experiencing extremely slow backups since Mavericks. (50kb/sec...)

I can't believe that this is still a problem given all the issues elsewhere on these boards with Time Machine under previous OS versions.

Disappointed....

I just hooked up my external Firewire800 drive (my enclosure using WD drive) and no issue doing TM backup.  System runs fast as always.  I started with a fresh clean drive so maybe that has some impact.

After the first back up, the next updates aren't bad. It must just be that it is a compleltey new back-up trying to replace files in the old back-up, which takes forever. If a clean back-up from scratch AFTER erasing the disc is the answer, then I think Apple should get that news out to people.

I am going to try this when the work week starts on my 2nd back-up. The first one took a long time over wireless, then USB on that drive took forever, I canceled used another drive which worked in 7 hours for 500GB.

I will report ack if erasing, then backing up on the 1st drive works.

Still a pain in the arse, but with technology, i've come to just expect problem after problem. One of my netwrok cameras just stopped working too. I had to set it up from Windows XP and can't for the likfe of me figure out why the mac won't do it. -

Year, I have the same problem. After 6 Hors of noncompleting the Backup I deleted the complete existing Backup (before update to Mavericks I did a Backup on a externe harddrive). Now the Backup of 500Gb needs 1 Hour for 1 Gb, ie 500 Hours for a complete Backup. Incredible....  Apple has to do an immediate support of Mavericks and Time Machine

I sure hope all of you experiencing problems have submitted feedback to Apple?