Q: Time Machine extremely slow on Mavericks ?

Thanks Elencus for such a detailed post

My 2c worth.  Have done all the basics like everyone - trash TM bkup, reformat, reinstal etc but still incredibly slow and seeing much more to bkup than can be real.  Only getting through 2x bkups a day (24hrs) and TM seeing 4-6GB immediately after finishing cleanup + shut down + restart with no other activity (can't be right)

Each time I restart, TM mounts the TMBackups volume with (Backups.backup folder) + EFI volume, and not the WD TimeMachine Backup volume, so TM "can not find the sparsebundle"   .... (?name conflict)

I loaded TimeMachineBuddy to Dashboard to capture details

TM loops and can not mount the actual WD TMBkup volume, I must eject the "Bkup folder" disk and manually mount the WD TM vol/share.  Then TM can begin but even though just a restart since last bkup finished Tm sees way too much (2GB) to rebackup and padding (5+GB)

Of course everything was working fine under ML and nothing new has been done other than the SWupdate

Network and USB connections to network drive, slow, then I hooked up through ethernet and it's normal. ??

That doesn't make any sense, but unless you have hours to dedicate to trying to figure it out, (see above comments. - Good write up - but - ) I have no clue why I got it to work with ethernet and not the other way(s). Has to be a coincedence. I have too much stuff to do to worry about it now, but i'm curious if anyone else can try an ethernet connection and see it that helps?

I'm paying attention to this thread as I need back-up I can depend on.

Me too; ran three consecutive backups with an 5mb file created and deleted in 2nd and 3rd. It worked - very slowly, in both "preparing" and writing". BUT it reported backing up 300mb ish each time? Something wrong here since there should not have been anything beyond this file to back up.

I've tried everything.  I tried an Iomega NAS, I tried to format old WD externald drives and start from scrach, I pulled the firewire and replaced it with USB.  Nothing works.  I went to the Western Digital site -- they have just issued new firmware that is supposed to fix this problem.  But my WD RAID drives are 17 months old, and are apparently so ancient that WD does not even list them any more, much less provide software.  I will call them tomorrow and have a chat -- maybe they can help?

This isn't a WD issue it happens on all drives, and most interfaces. The one common denominator seems to be TM trying to back up a LOT more then it should. See above where it tried to back up 300mb for a 5mb change. TM under Mavericks is screwed my 397GB became a 1TB backup (on its first backup !) I see instinces of TM trying to back up double what that drive even holds (on its first backup) .

Having the same problem with Time Machine and my MacBook Air. Backups are irritating slow. Hopefully, Apple will wake up and do something about it.

I think a lot of people are seeing slowness because they are moving a high volumes of files (count not size), which bogs down transfers. This is inevitable with Time Machine. Since its a new OS, its probably reindexing everything too (spotlight, time machine, etc).

Purely related to speed using Time Capsule as a drive... I was moving an 80gb library and received estimates in the days. Then I zipped the same file and moved it over in 40min.

Found a fix for this. Worked for me. Time Machine now backing up faster than ever.

It seems the new energy saving features introduced in Mavricks are interfering with Time Machine. I guess somone forgot to add an exeption for Time Machine backups!

1. Go to Sytem Preferences.

2. Click on Energy Saver and uncheck the box that says 'Put hard disks to sleep when possible'. Do the same under the battery tab.

This made my machine backup TEN times faster. Should now be sorted. You may need to restart the backup before you notice the improvment. 

Try this first!

Failing that, here's something else you can try.

Right click on your external HD and selct 'More info'. Check that it is formated to 'OSX Extended Journaled'. Mavricks changed my formatting to 'OSX extented journalsed, case sentastive' - which doesn't work well with Time Machine. The only solution to that is to backup your data elsewhere and reformat.

Hope that helps...

Unfortunately, none of us had this problem pre Mavericks. I backed up and moved the same files & folders that I am using now and the backups were fast, efficient and unoticed. Now, if I have to go to a meeting or need to take my MacBook from my desk, I have to interupt the backup because it takes all day.

I have let the backup run uninterupted and it took a full day (and this is not the initial backup since I upgraded to Mavericks), but since then, it never seems to finish and the incremental backups are significantly bigger than they have been in the past.

As I and others have posted on some other threads on this issue, check to see if Spotlight is indexing your hard drive or another disk.  Click on the magnifying glass in extreme upper right corner of screen.  Time Machine apparently will run very slowing if it is.  If it's an external disk just eject it and see if that helps.  My 8 gig flash drive takes forever for Spotllight to index so I have used Spotlight preferences under Private to have it excluded from Spotllight indexing.  That has solved my problem. 

BertieTBE I disabled the 'Put hard disks to sleep when possible' option and it has definitely reduced the backup file sze; previously it was in the GB range and now the incremental backups are in the MB range...so this is an improvement.

However, the speed is still significantly reduced. It has been backing up for close to an hour now and still reads "Backing up: 78 KB of 84.5 MB". NOTE: I have a USB 3.0 connection.

To be honest, this drive was significantly faster in TM on my older MacBook Pro 13" with USB 2.0 than it is on my top-of-the line MacBook Pro Retina 15" fully loaded with USB 3.0.

I exclude all external drives from Spotlight indexing. With the number of drives I have it would always be indexing. Anyway, if you choose not to index the external drives there is a program called Easy Find that will search non indexed drives. It is not as fast but it does eliminate the interaction between Spotlight and TM.

I had to do a TM restore late Tuesday night for reasons unrealated to this TM problem but it reminded me of behavior I have seen in the past. The restore worked just fine and upon getting back up an running I got things back to normal and then turned TM back on and told it to backup now using the same backup I was using before the restore. The initial backup after upgrading took almost 17 hours but this time around it took just under 9 hours.

When I started the backup I noticed it said it was backing up about the same amount as the first backup, about 330gb. This essentially doubled the size of the TM backup. The key here is that I have seen this same behavior when I had to restore and then used the same backup. So it would seem to be normal behavior if you upgrade and use the same backup. Also, this time around Spotlight was not indexing when I did the backup so I believe Spotlight could be accounting for a good bit of the slowness in the intitial backup for some.

So try this especially if you have multiple external drives and you have Spotlight indexing them. Exclude all external drives and make sure Spolight is not still indexing the internal drive. I stopped indexing external drives a long time ago because I have quite a few attached and I noticed that spotlight spent a lot of time indexing. If you need to search your external drives get Easy Find. It is not as fast but it does a very nice job for that rare occasion when I really do need to search external drives. Also let that first backup start and walk away from the computer. I noticed that the backup seemed to go quite a bit faster when I was not using the computer.

Now all this is not to say that Apple doesn't have a serious problem on their hands. They do and they need to get it fixed fast. But I think we have two main groupings in this discussion. Those that have a real problem and those that can be explained more as normal operation that seems to be a problem. I was one of those who thought he had a real problem but have now come to think it was just a combination of having too many things going on at once.

Message was edited by: Protagonist

OK, scratch everything I said earlier, the TM backup is still running and now states "84.2 MB of 13.69 GB'" "Calculating time remaining..." and it has siad that for 2 hours now.

I am over all of this. None of the fixes stated by others in this discussion are working.

Where is Steve Jobs when you need him? He would have fixed this problem by now!! RIP Steve. We miss you!

Turned off the indexing of my external harddrive seems to have done the trick. For the first time by TM is giving me a estimated time of completion. so far 20% complete moving steadily.

I didn't have to turn of indexing in the past for TM to work properly, so there is clearly some error in Maverick's. Indexing and TM backup's to the same harddrive should not coincide.