Q: Time Machine extremely slow on Mavericks ?

Still ongoing....  I have tried every combination in all of these suggestions, including my own.  Still not fixed, but two observations:

1.  Since updating to Mavericks, my internal iMac HD has been running nearly non-stop, no matter what I've been doing or not doing.  I presume that it's (still?) indexing?  All external drives have been excluded, also half th list that Apple provides for the internal drive.  But neither Spotlight nor anything else shows up in Activity Monitor as being the cause.  Don't know if that's related to TM, but it might be.

2.  I checked with WD by telephone.  They insisted that I remove WD Disk Manager, so I did -- no difference.  In rummaging around the WD site, I noticed that some of the newest WD drives have firmware available that clearly states that it fixes the Mavericks problem.  If you use WD drives, check out http://support.wdc.com, search for your drive; if yours has a firmware update, and it works, let us know.  My drive, being 17 months old (you know, back in the Dark Ages), does not have a firmware update.  WD insists that they will have one.

To my observations and analysis, this is clearly an Apple Mavericks problem.  Drive firmware may contribute, but the only single consistent conclusion is that Mavericks has a serious bug in it.  I'm looking for Apple updates to Mavericks, but have seen none yet.  I don't know if they are working on this problem or not.

For what it's worth. 

Oh yes, regarding indexing.  If I turn off everything in indexing, there is no difference to any behavior on my machine, other than Spotlight can't find anything.

Hi Alaz0,

Don't deselect any items on the harddrive unless you want to for reason unrelated to TM. In order to stop the indexing of external harddrives. go to the tab "Privacy" in the spotlight setting and add the external harddrives attached to your mac via the plus sign at the bottom.

Hope this helps. My TM works great after stopping the indexing!

I havent noticed it being slow, but it does seem to do its clean-up routine a lot more.

I tried that too, no difference at all.  And to phxpaul, A typical incremental TM backup took about 2-3 minutes on Mountain Lion, now times in at up to 70 days (yes, days).  That's not just slow....  So far, I've tried everything in all the Apple threads, and then some -- nothing has worked yet. 

I do notice that my iMac HD has been constanty running (i.e., making noises as though it's reading/writing) non stop since upgrading to Mavericks.  Activity Monitor shows some activity in the drive, but no program is showing up as causing it.

Still baffled.....

TRY THIS -- there may be a write permission problem on the "Macintosh HD" from the "upgrade"

Right click your "Macintosh HD" -> click "Get Info".  At the bottom, check "Sharing and Permissions".  I noticed that my username was not on the list, and only "system" had write privileges.  "Wheel" and "'everyone" had only read privileges.  (I don't know how to find who is in the "wheel" group).  If you're not on the list, click the lock on the bottom right and open it with your password.  Then, click "+" at the bottom left and in the pop-up, you should see your username; click on it -> "Select".  It should be added to you "Sharing and Permissions" list.  Your Privilege will probably show up as "Read only".  Click on the privilege and select "Read & Write".

Doing this, my Time Machine ia at least dong something, albeit slowly; but less slowly than before.  Let me know what you find.

Does Apple monitor their own forums or are we all just responding to each other hoping to find a solution?! I find it strange that nobody officially from Apple Support is responding to this thread—not an experience I have found with outer companies.

I'm partly through a discussion. with AppleCare - so they know. I've told then they have a major systemic problem.

I Have had several probs. My config is mavericks iMac -> Ethernet > Lion iMac > thunderbolt seagate drive.

First problem was fixed; I had my firewall on - fine with Lion to Lion but NOT with a mixed OS network = Terrific.

Then TM worked very slowly, then it didn't. Error was in failing to backup and create the new .sparsebundle I called AppleCare and they said they would NOT support my config, I.e. networked 3rd party drive, but they would support if I moved the Thunderbolt drive to the Mavericks iMac (but only on this iMac). Ugh!!!

So I've moved it across, and now TM works (at about 30-40mb/sec). Also my Lion iMac TM works back the other way, although very slowly. When switching the drive like this both backups seemed to be forced back to initial full not incremental on the first backup.... not what one would expect.

Anyway I'm following up with an AppleCare supervisor next week.

Having lost so much time I've also ordered a 3TB Time Capsule, so perhaps Apple got what they want - notwithstanding one more ****** off customer.

Anything new I'll post.

General reply here. At least in my case, it's Norton Anti-Virus 12.6. Turn off Idle Scan and all is miraculously resolved. You may need to let the current backup finish and\or reboot, but this has fixed the issue across four separate Macs for me. I'd tried all the other solutions without success so this may be tne answer for at least some some of you.

hmmm   the original macman's most recent post above contained a solution that seems to have worked for me...

I turned off idle scan in Norton Anti-Virus and now Time Machine updates take seconds, instead of hours. I just tried creating a new, virgin Time Machine archive on a freshly formated Thunderbolt drive, and instead of taking 2 or 3 DAYS, it took about 3 hours to backup 750 Gb. My early 2013 15" macbook pro is now exhibiting time machine behavior that is just as quick as it was with Mountain Lion, a few weeks ago. I do believe that this solved the problem for me. 

An Applecare supervisor had been working with me daily for the past week and had not found this solution. I will let him know my experience, and hope that this solution works for others here.

Seconding hkAntarctica's second.  The IdleScan turn-off for Norton was a huge leap in spead.

I've tried just about everything else, including moving to different discs, reformatting, etc.

Thanks to the original macman's suggestion, I think I may get a full back up of my 142.8 GB in less than a week of time.

Norton Anti-virus 12.6 idle time scan was the problem for me with both thunderbolt (drobo) and wifi to airport extreme usb drive time machine backups!

Some more on this issue on symantec forums:

http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-for-Mac/NAV-Mac-v12-6-creating-a-Baziilion -small-files-WHICH-THEN-HAVE/m-p/1039065#M7344

alaz0:  that should not make any difference.  Not having your name there is a standard setup and should not have any impact on TM speed.  My name does show up and my TM speed on Mavericks is same as on ML which is OK.

I've been following this chain.  Before Mavericks a normal backup (20-30MB) would take about 15 minutes including the trim on my MBP over WiFi.  After Mavericks it would take up to 2 hours.  I really did not want to reformat my Time Capsule.  I tried something simple.  I turned off "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" in the Energy Saver panel.  Not a difficult decision since I have an SSD and I don't think putting them to sleep saves any power and I don't think that was set before I installed Mavericks, but I can't be sure.  That seemed to solve my problem.  Backups have been back to normal.  I even updated my VMware Windows 7 virtual machine after installing Fusion 6.  That generated over 27GB of changes which was backed up in less than 90 minutes over WiFi.

BTW, I noticed that the Time Machine preference panel does not display the time for the Next Backup correctly.  It assumes the next backup is 1 hour after the start of the previous backup.  However Time Machine actually schedules it for 1 hour after the completion of the previous backup.