time machine and mail

These sorts of problems (slow Time Machine recovery) are sometimes difficult to solve - do you have AppleCare support on this system? If so would suggest that route for quickest resolution. If you don't:

Is there any unusual activity on your MacBook Air (does "Activity Monitor" show some high CPU usage for any processes before you start Time Machine recovery effort)? How full is the Time Machine backup drive? How full is your system disk? Is Spotlight enabled on the Time Machine disk (so that spotlight and backups are competing with each other)? How large is the system disk (your backup disk you say is 1TB)? Do backups complete in a reasonable amount of time or do they also take a long time?

If this were my problem this is what I would look at:

0. Do a little research into these discussion forums for others who have complained about time machine restores being slow:

Look at:

Accessing Time Machine Backup to Restore a File is Very Slow

If you can't back up or restore your Mac using Time Machine - Apple Support

etc

1. Look at "Activity Monitor" (located in /Applications/Utilities) and see if any high-cpu processes running - can't be running Time Machine when doing this). Click on the "CPU" tab and then the %cpu column to sort by descending CPU percentage.

2. are backups completing OK without errors? When is most recent backup? How full is the backup disk? Look in Console.app (located in /Applications/Utilities) and see what sorts of messages are there about "backupd". Select either "All Messages" or the "system.log" item on the list along the left of the Console window. You might need to select one of the other system log files like system.log.0.gz or other numbered versions depending on how long ago backups have been run.

3. Look at any messages when you are trying to run Time Machine (have to start and then cancel Time Machine after a few minutes and then look at console messages that might be in logs during this period of time)

4. Open "Spotlight" System Preference and look at Privacy tab - is the external disk your doing your backups on listed? If it isn't then Spotlight is probably actively building it's indexes and this can take a long time to finish on heavily populated disks. Click the "+" button at the bottom to add that volume if it's not listed. You can also use the Terminal command "mdutil -a -s" to see which volumes are being indexed by Spotlight.

If you need help in any of above say so and will give more details...

Basically looking for "clues" as to what might be causing the long delay in Time Machine response.

Good luck...

If you have a lot of backups going back over a long time, it can take Time Machine a long time to build the index. Depending on the age of your MacBook Air, it's not necessarily a fast processor, which can slow things down even more. Give it some time and see if that helps. If not, it is possible to manually restore them, but it isn't a minor process and you'd need to shuffle things around a bit not to lose your current mail (see https://www.macissues.com/2014/12/07/how-to-manually-restore-your-mail-folder-fr om-time-machine/ for an idea of what's involved).