Time machine backups very, very slow

Add me to the list of people who are experiencing painfully slow TM backup across network on a USB drive. From the comments, it looks like it doesn't matter if it is a network or local drive. Come on Apple, fix it, this is just ridiculous.

Still no luck. I've been unable to solve this issue with my iMac. I tried a number of things that I thought might help, but didn't:

1) Rebuilt Spotlight indexes

2) Cleanup TimeMachine exclude list

3) Eliminated the ReadyNAS and used only the TimeCapsule

4) Connected iMac directly to TimeCapsule instead of through an attached ethernet switch

5) Change iMac Ethernet's MTU size back from jumbo 9000 to standard 1500

6) Manually deleted old backup file from TimeCapsule

7) Disabled encryption of the TimeMachine backup

I was able to backup to a directly attached USB3 drive. The problem to the TimeCpasule is at times intermittent because I did get 1 fast backup during my testing but then tried to reproduce it and could not. I'm currently in my 4th day of a full backup (~450GB) and it's got 3 hours to completion - so it isn't a complete hang. (I also have 2 MacBooks that backup to this TimeCapsule without issue, so the issue isn't with that hardware)

Other things I may try are:

1) Install El Capitan onto a USB drive and see if it can backup the full system

2) Reinstall El Capitan onto the iMac

What worked for me was to delete .Spotlight-V100 and .fseventsd from the root of my drive.

This worked for me.

I received an error shortly into the following backup, so I used "Select Disk" from within Time Machine to reselect the drive in question. TM then prompted me if I wanted to create a new back or continue with the previous backup. I choose "New" and it works like a charm now. IMHO, TM wants to create a mounted volume (transparent to the user) and the issue stems somewhere within that process. Removing the files mentioned by coutts99 and the reselection of the drive in TM seems to initiate a new backup and mount.

I'm really becoming disappointed with Apple's Network/Time Capsule products. The Airport Time Capsule is an over priced paper weight as far as I'm concerned and jumping through hoops for something as trivial as backing up data to a NAS is simply unacceptable. Here's hoping I never encounter this error again or what would be the point of all these incremental backups?

I am using a Synology NAS as well. Please see my previous post. Hope this helps.

Yeah same here but in my case, I deleted the existing backup and restart fresh and it is going a lot faster so far, hopefully it'll continue after the initial backup.

j4kp07 wrote:

I'm really becoming disappointed with Apple's Network/Time Capsule products. The Airport Time Capsule is an over priced paper weight as far as I'm concerned and jumping through hoops for something as trivial as backing up data to a NAS is simply unacceptable. Here's hoping I never encounter this error again or what would be the point of all these incremental backups?

It doesn't have anything to do with the Time Capsule. It is just the residential network router your NAS is attached to. To work properly as a Time Machine backup device, the NAS must meet all of Apple's Time Machine Server Requirements. Regardless of NAS manufacturer claims to the contrary, few if any actually do. Many NAS manufacturers just include support for the basic AFP 2.x standard, & a few support 3.1 or above, but there is more to it than that.

I disagree that it has to do with NAS providers not adhering to Apple's Time Machine Server Requirements, it seems to work fine with a fresh TM backup, this problem only occurred subsequently though no one seems to know why it deteriorated over time. In my case, the latest occurrence is due to me upgrading from OS X El Capitan 10.11.1 to 10.11.2. Now I have to delete the backup and start fresh. Argh!

bobngu wrote:

I disagree that it has to do with NAS providers not adhering to Apple's Time Machine Server Requirements, it seems to work fine with a fresh TM backup, this problem only occurred subsequently though no one seems to know why it deteriorated over time. In my case, the latest occurrence is due to me upgrading from OS X El Capitan 10.11.1 to 10.11.2. Now I have to delete the backup and start fresh. Argh!

Disagree if you want but the symptoms you describe are completely consistent with a NAS that does not fully comply with Apple's requirements, particularly not or incorrectly supporting the lock & lock stealing requirements.

Then how do you explain that the a fresh backup is much faster? If what you said is true, it should affect all backups, not just subsequent backups.

bobngu wrote:

Then how do you explain that the a fresh backup is much faster? If what you said is true, it should affect all backups, not just subsequent backups.

With a fresh backup, there is no previous session & thus no need for proper support of lock stealing, no need to refer to a replay cache, & so on.

Wouldn't be too hard on the Time Capsule, in my case I started having slow backups on both a Time Capsule and a NAS and even starting with fresh backups hasn't solve my issue. But I also don't think R C-R's quick-to-condemn-NAS approach is justified. My Netgear ReadyNAS has properly supported Time Machine for a long time (it isn't that hard really) and I've even performed a successful and necessary restore with it.

Thank you 😉 I will look into it but I would like to avoid to play with system files if possible. For now I have ditched Time machine it doesn't work!!!

I agree NAS is not the issue not it is wifi or cable it is El capitan. But strangely it doesn't affect all users just some

Same problem upgraded to El Capitan and now it is slower than slow.(1 hour 1.8MB) this to my WD cloud NAS. Had no real problems before.

So after reading the whole thread I just removed the disk, deleted the backup and re attached it. Now the backup is going fast again and is finished in a few hours (the initial backup via Gigabit ethernet). Seems there are difference in the way TM works in the different versions.

I Backup to a WD My Cloud Over WiFi, and to several USB 3 drives, they all used to work fast, but not for the last few months. I am using El Captain and all software is up to date. The USB drives are directly connected to my MacBook Air and the backups are now dreadfully slow, always longer than 24 hours. It is disgraceful of Apple to not investigate this issue that is clearly affecting a lot of now unhappy Apple users. Poor customer service is what springs to mind.