Time Machine recovery extremely slow

I had an issue with my Crucial SSD which stopped it from booting. I erased the SSD and from internet recovery started a recover from time machine process using an external HDD via USB.


Normally when I transfer files to and from the SDD to the HDD its very fast. But time machine recovery is extremely slow. It’s been about 18hrs and only transferred 36GB (I would normall do that in less than 2hrs). I have 200GB to recover. That will take days.


Is this normal and is there anything I can do to speed it up?

Posted on Aug 19, 2018 8:24 PM

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5 replies

Aug 19, 2018 10:55 PM in response to SabirA

No.. you should get much better speed.. 200GB should take no more than 4 hours.


Is this normal and is there anything I can do to speed it up?

How old is the Mac you are recovering over the USB?


Does it have actual USB3 ports or are you plugging into USB hub or Thunderbolt hub?


Anything that needs drivers is going to be very slow until the drivers are loaded.


Something large that is then using USB2 could have some incompatibilty issues.


It is hard to know..


A better way might be to create a Mac OS install USB stick.. install the OS.. and then use migration instead of setup assistant type recovery.

Aug 20, 2018 12:59 PM in response to SabirA

Your Macbook has USB3 ports.. and it should not be that slow.


Did you reformat the drive HFS+ or APFS?


Was the original install APFS? If you loaded High Sierra before the breakdown.. it will automatically and without your knowledge convert the disk from HFS+ to APFS. Attempting to restore Time Machine backup to HFS+ might cause issues.. and slowness.. although I am not sure of all the implications.

That is why I think it is better to clean install High Sierra.. which will be to APFS.. and then migrate the files and apps back to the Mac.

Your question is really better under the OS you are running since this is nothing to do with Time Capsule or airports that we deal with here.. mostly.

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Time Machine recovery extremely slow

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