Q: Time Machine extremely slow on Mavericks ?

I have a Mac Pro. I took a new external HD, reformatted it and started the Time machine process. I am backing up 717GB of data.

While I expected the process to be slow for the initial backup, I gave up after 30 hours when only 25GB had been backed up. I did notice that Spotlight turned itself on after 6 hours trying to index the INTERNAL drive and I assume this is part of the reason for the slowness of the backup. (What would only take a couple of minutes for spotlight was taking HOURS... even though Spotlight did index my system after Mavericks was installed.)

Anybody else seeing this happen?

Curtis

I, too, have noticed Time Machine backups take a lot longer than before.  Mine wasn't as slow as yours, but it's still slow.  Also, as a side note, I do not like that the Time Machine icon does not animated when it is making a backup anymore.

This isn't specific to Mavericks. I've noticed that behavior with the last several versions of OS X. One of the older Macs I have, running 10.7, has been sitting quietly on the desk with no one doing anything on it for nearly 72 hours, yet it is currently backing up over 40Gb of data.

Mine is still running now, it's taken FOUR DAYS to back up 85GB over a wired network. I haven't used the computer once in those four days, literally no opened a single application.

Hopefully it'll be finished tomorrow

I'm having the same issue.  I shut down a ~350 GB backup with Time Machine after 24 hours.  Internal drive or external USB Drive same issue.  Reverted to Carbon Copy Clone and was completed in less than 6 hours.  Time Machine DOES NOT work with Mavericks and a Mac Mini.

i did this on a 2007 MBP skipped MT Lion due to major WiFI hardware issues that were fixed in Mavericks. The first backup too forever had to stop it twice because of time. i plugged it directly in and it was even slower. I then tried again with WIFI back to Time Capsule it said would take two hours but actually only took hour. After first backup it was fairly fast.

Hi all, same here! I even have reformatted the Time Machine HDD connected via FW800 / Thunderbolt and ran it again. Sometimes it gets stuck at 70 KB sometimes at 100 GB but it never finishes.

After this upgrade my Time Machine will not back-up anything.

It repeatedly states the backup could not be performed.

Then states there is not enough available space.

That is NOT the actual fact or truth as my external HD/Time Machine is much larger than my iMac7 materials in memory, especially when I eliminate my videos and photos rom the backup specs.

So as of now my TM is just unplugged!!!

What to do????

I recently reformatted and installed Mavericks on my mid-2011 Mac Mini. I use Time Machine to back up to 2 USB hard drives and a partition on my second internal drive. The initial backup to the internal drive (also reformatted) ran quickly, but the incrementals have been running slowly. One took 14 hours today, and TM is now stuck at backing up 3.1 MB of 3.4 MB (yes, megabytes) after running for 50 minutes. At that rate, who knows when I'll get the external drives running again.

Before I tried reformatting, I installed Mavericks over Mountain Lion, and the first TM backup took 2 days to the internal drive and 2 days to one of the external drives, for 70 GB of files.

Same general story for me.  The suggestion to reformat and start anew, seems to defeat the purpose--especially in the wake of a new OS.  I don't deny that this might be the only timely way to get regular backups running again, but that's not the same as a solution, as opposed to giving up on finding a solution.  Why would someone think that erasing the history of backups is an acceptable fix, especially given, e.g., the abomination that is the new iWork?  I already had to restore from TM once when I unthinkingly "upgraded" my iWork and discovered that my Numbers gradebook was utterly unusable, with all of the classes jumbled into one (with the elimination of categories) and half of the links to other sheets broken--arbitrarily as far as I can tell.  The upgrade renders the files, in particular if stored in the cloud, unusable in iWork 09, even if you have the original installation media.  Perfect example of what makes TM valuable.  Being able to go back to earlier states (of both an individual file or the computing environment) is rather the point of TM as opposed to occasional clones--which I also do, but that's not really helpful here.  In this way, I lost only the time it took to restore the machine.  I grant that a super-user could cull the clone for local versions of the cloud files, but not all of us are super-users (hence the dependence on TM).

The MBP, which was an upgrade via the App store, has had no difficulty with TM backups to the Time Capsule (wired and wireless).  The MBA (a clean installation) is averaging about 16MB per hour, over enet.  After 14 hours it is still calculating the remaining time.  While it is doing this, the machine is not really usable, since this "calculation" seems to bleed the already insufficient (4GB) RAM.  Within 10 minutes of starting the backup, the RAM drops to 600-800MB reported available.

Details:  two Macbooks (2011 MBP, and 2010 MBA) on a 2TB Time Capsule, both upgraded from 10.8.  MBP update-in-place seems fine.  MBA clean install, not so much.  Both backups are encrypted, both backup images are about 6 months old.  The MBP image is approaching 200GB and the MBA image is about 150.  This is the only stuff on the Time Capsule.  Usually the machines are wireless, though I used ethernet for the upgrades.  Restarted the backup two hours ago; it is 18.7MBs into an 84.34GB backup.  Yipes.

Add me to the list of people having the same problems.

FIVE days later, still not finished.

Just completely (and VERY reluctantly) formatted my entire time capsule.

New backup now started, looks to be running just as slow

It was equally as slow.

Figuring I now have nothing to lose, I just did a complete factory reset on the Time Capsule, re-set it up and wiped the drive yet again.

Currently "preparing backup..."

Still just as slow

So!

Out of interest, I setup a share on my Windows 7 pc and copied files manually to the time capsule. Normal speeds, no issues there.

Continuing the "***, why does that happen?" theme, I then unplugged the usb lan cable from my macbook and connected the wifi to the AP of the time capsule.

Hey presto, 20x faster!

*** does that happen?!

I've gone from an unknown time remaining down to 23hrs (which is still stupidly slow for a trimmed 62GB but better than nothing)...