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Time machine been working for 24hrs - and still not done!

J

joefinan

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Time machine has been backing-up my 50GB of data via USB 2.0 for 24hrs - and has only done 15.14GB worth. At this rate it's going to take all week!

Is this just my computer or is TM a bit crap?
 
That does seem a bit extreme. Is your disk being used heavily by anything else?

However, USB is pretty poor at shifting moving large files.
 
It was definitely taking a while for me but I had a crash in the middle and have yet to resume. It was about 15GB through 50GB and it had taken a few hours. CCC or SuperDuper can clone my entire drive in 4 hours.
 
My computer has been doing nothing else - I left it overnight thinking I'd wake up this morning and it'd be done.

At this rate I'd estimate it'll be done by Sunday night. RUBBISH!!
 
one more thing...

i dont think TM is crap. I backed up 100GB, 2x as much as you, from my macbook pro over airport extreme to a hard drive on my powermac internal hard drive (i have it set up as a server) and it finished in 4-5 hours. Seems like you are experiencing an unexpected problem
 
Time Machine Slow - potential work-arounds

Hi there,

There is quite a bit of discussion on this in the Apple support discussion forums. Most users (myself included) who got it working faster went in to spotlight preferences to stop spotlight indexing the target disk (I also stopped it indexing other external disks too).
Go in to
System Preferences => Spotlight => Privacy
and just add the drives in question.
Rgds
Charlie🙂
 
I had an initial problem with TM. While it was performing the initial backup, I began playing with Spaces. I moved the little window for TM to another Space windows, and then things went downhill real quick. Somehow the finder stopped working, and although the TM back was still running, there was no progress. I then force killed and relaunched the finder and that cleared the problem. TM then started showing progress again and finished in a fair amount of time.
 
mac-convert said:
I had an initial problem with TM. While it was performing the initial backup, I began playing with Spaces. I moved the little window for TM to another Space windows, and then things went downhill real quick. Somehow the finder stopped working, and although the TM back was still running, there was no progress. I then force killed and relaunched the finder and that cleared the problem. TM then started showing progress again and finished in a fair amount of time.
Click to expand...

Leopard is great, but I am always thrilled with new software updates that tackle problems like these!! Here's hoping for 10.5.1 within 2 weeks!

But you've gotta love Time Machine's ability to pick back up where it got interrupted instead of starting from scratch! Connecting to servers in leopard is a lot less painful now because it doesn't freak out if something goes wrong with the connection.
 
mac-convert said:
I had an initial problem with TM. While it was performing the initial backup, I began playing with Spaces. I moved the little window for TM to another Space windows, and then things went downhill real quick. Somehow the finder stopped working, and although the TM back was still running, there was no progress. I then force killed and relaunched the finder and that cleared the problem. TM then started showing progress again and finished in a fair amount of time.
Click to expand...

I had the same problem. When I restarted TimeMachine transferred about 110 gigs via Firewire 400 in sbout 4 hrs. I think the initial problems users had were from the overload of TimeMachine backing up, Search indexing, and playing around with the new OS at the same time.🙂
 
TM for me took about 6 hours to do 550 GB over FW400 on my 8-core Mac Pro with 10GB of RAM.

I was very surprised at how slow it was. But now that it is setup, the subsequent backups seem to take only a few mins to a few seconds. All that setup time was worth something.
 
I set enabled Time Machine before I went to bed last night and when I got up it had done a full backup and about 3 hourly ones of over 400GB data to an external USB2 drive. Sounds like the op has a problem! Is it definitely running over USB2 and not plugged into a USB1.1 hub or something similar?
 
Mine was going real sluggish too. As noted above, I excluded all of my drives, including my internal drives from spotlight search and it started moving. It finished within a few hours after that.
 
I also had to reboot after excluding the external drive from Spotlight for TM to backup at a reasonable pace.
 
TM Slow on one machine

I have a G5 isight iMac and an intel core 2 duo iMac that I updated to 10.5 yesterday. The G5 does a very fast backup to a older 300 GB Maxtor system using TM. It does a much slower backup to another 500 GB (brand?) In both cases the drives have been repartitioned and formatted to extended format.

In the case of the intel iMac it is very slow on the Maxtor and glacial on the other drive. In an 8 hour period with screen saver off, power management set to never sleep and spotlight set to exclude the target drive it only backed up 21 GB of 238.5 GB. At that speed it should be finished about mid week. 😕
The 500 GB is a new drive that I bought for TM.

In both cases they are 2.0 USB hard drives. I can transfer a large (25 GB) file from both machines to both drives in about the same time and what you would expect for USB. There are no other external devices connected just to eliminate that possible issue. The only other difference was the fact that the G5 was base lined with 10.4 about a week ago. The intel has been running for about a year.

Does anyone have an idea?

Thanks
 
Not sure what the issue is with the iMac and TM, at the rate it is transferring it will take 8 hours or more to back up 42 gig to a brand new 320 gig usb, My Book. I backed up my MBP (72 gig) to a usb 160 gig ad it took a little over an hour, Hmmmm?
 
I backed up my Mac Pro.Everything.About 130 gigs.

Did it in about 30 minutes.
It's very important that you have all apps installed,permissions repaired and spotlight has finished it's indexing.And make sure you have your screensaver set to never go on and your hard drives set not to spin down.
 
tdsluss said:
In the case of the intel iMac it is very slow on the Maxtor and glacial on the other drive. In an 8 hour period with screen saver off, power management set to never sleep and spotlight set to exclude the target drive it only backed up 21 GB of 238.5 GB. At that speed it should be finished about mid week. 😕
The 500 GB is a new drive that I bought for TM.
Click to expand...

That does seem slow - much slower than what I have seen. Were it me, and since it sounds like you have all of the setting right (see Peace's post above mine), I would probably cancel it, put the drive on a different USB port, and start over. Or, you could just let it finish through to Wednesday, since only the first backup is going to be this heavy.
 
Time Machine (like Spotlight) keeps hanging on me on both a new 24" iMac and old 17" 1Ghz Powerbook.

Time machine gets about 1/4 of the way done, then hangs. I don't know if it's a bad file somewhere or what, but how am I supposed to figure out which file is bad if it is?
 
I have been having the same problems as others...TM unable to complete the back up. I will try some of the suggestions listed here to see if it fixes the problem.

Does it seem reasonable that I'm able to back up 150 gb or so in about 10 minutes via FW800 using "Backup"...while it was looking like it was going to take hours with TM?

Darren
 
Do you use Parallels?

I've read elsewhere that Parallels can cause TM to slow down/mis-fire.

The suggestion is to exclude your Virtual Machines from the TM backup.
 
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