Hi,
I've noticed that over the last few months, the time my iMac takes to do a back up via time machine seams to take longer each time. The amount of data it backs up can be small or big and it still takes a while to 'preparing backup'.
Today I carried out a back up and it backed up just under 4GB of data but the time it took to prepair the back up took about 5/7 minutes. Is this normal?
I'm running OS X 10.11.2
iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5), 21inch
Time Machine backup time can vary greatly based on the status of the data on your machine. Time machine backs up anything that has changed since your last backup and any software that was added or updated since your last backup. It also occasionally re-indexes the backup which takes a bit of time as well. 5-7 minutes does not seem long or unreasonable. Read this Apple Knowledge Base article about Time machine backup times.
If a Time Machine backup takes longer than you expect - Apple Support
Hi Mobile Blues, thanks for your reply.
Could you tell me, if Time Machine had an issue with a photo, would that cause it to take longer? For example; I just downloaded some photos off a web site to use as a wallpaper on my iMac. When I viewed the photos in the finder, out of the 15 photos only 6 showed up with a thumbnail image of the photo itself, the others just showed up blank. I added all the photos to the Photos app and I was able to see each photo on thumbnail. If the photos were corrupt or have issues, could this cause Time Machine to run slow?
How long should time machine back up take?
