Time Machine very slow

Yes.

"Preparing Backup" takes a unacceptably long. Almost seems frozen. Mac gets really hot, and fans start spinning. Also, it took TM 30 min to backup 200mb.

Somethings wrong.

Mine's been slow, but not THAT slow...
It is definitely slower than under SL. I was attributing that to the two different OS's now part of my TM backups?

I have an encrypted TM running. The dialog tells me it's going to take 5 hours to backup 200GB via FireWire. A Similar non-encrypted backup under SL took 2 hours. I just figure the difference in time is the overhead for the encryption.

Exactly the same problem here.

Are you using an Airport as a router by any chance?

Slow Time Machine on Lion

Exactly the same problem on my machines. My imac took hours, and my MBA is saying 'preparing backup' for ages and then updating KB by KB. I thought there might be a network problem as I backup wirelessly from my MBA through my router to the external hard drive attached to my imac, but no...I plugged in to my MBA via USB and it is still very slow...and the fan is whirring away wildly!

Fix from Apple anyone?

Yes, slower to the point, I thought I had an issue with the firewire, but it's definitely Lion....has this been reported?

harrisondavies said:

Yes, slower to the point, I thought I had an issue with the firewire, but it's definitely Lion....has this been reported?

Click to expand...

I've never had a problem with Apple before LOL... how do we go about reporting something like this en masse? You would think Apple would monitor forums like this and its own forums?

Same here. It always takes ~5 minutes for TM to "prepare" for backup. Under SL TM prepared in seconds.

in my case, it is slow, but not that slow. while backup to T/C, the mac became very hot.

Yeah I've got the same problem. Anyone know why or how to fix this?

i also had this problem.
it seems that the first TM backup after lion was installed was ~26GB (for me, anyway).
TM was forever "preparing for backup" and when i say forever, this went on for at least an hour.
anyway, i decided to be patient and when it finally finished "preparing", it was ridiculously slow to back up.
i let it do it's thing over night and since then, everything seemingly has gotten back to normal.

Taking ages for me too plus mba getting very hot in the process with not that much cpu usage.

Some suggested it could be drop box causing the issue so I excluded that folder and will see what happens.

I had this on my time machine hdd that also had SL backups. I wiped the whole disk and backed up again. Now it works fine.

(quick "sort-of-on-topic" question):

Does time machine back up keep my iMac from "sleeping"/keep it awake? Or do I need to activate a program such as "caffeine" to keep it from going into sleep mode while time machine is doing it's thing?

I had this problem as well after updating to Lion. Updating used to take only a few minutes (particularly if nothing had changed), but suddenly it took like half an hour. The Time Machine icon showed "preparing for backup" most of this time.

The time machine logs can give more insights into what is causing this problem (start console, type "backupd" in the search form). In my case "waiting for index to be ready" took a lot of time. This appeared to be due to a problem with Spotlight.

I got it fixed by turning off Time Machine, resetting Spotlight for both the system and the TM (this involves Spotlight rebuilding it's databases, which may take several hours), and then turning Time Machine on again. After that, updates took only a few minutes. I fixed my TM shortly after upgrading to Lion, so everything has been working without any issues for about a week now.

Spotlight re-indexing

So, the latest on my Time Machine saga is that Spotlight is re-indexing itself. I didn't ask it to, and I am confident it had finished after upgrading to Lion.

I will see if it fixes the issue when it finishes doing its thing!

Ian1982 said:

So, the latest on my Time Machine saga is that Spotlight is re-indexing itself. I didn't ask it to, and I am confident it had finished after upgrading to Lion.

I will see if it fixes the issue when it finishes doing its thing!

Click to expand...

Re-indexing complete, and Dropbox excluded from backups... no change

After working ok, my time machine is bust.

Time capsule is seen on the network but the backups aren't made because the backup drive can't be found.

This lion upgrade has been a bit of a nightmare.

Lion and Time Machine update

So, I let Time Machine on my MBA run its course, and it has at some point (I didn't sit and watch it) backed up...something...but has now remained as 'finishing backup' for the last 3 hours....[sigh]

I have never had any Apple problems, infact, I always thought I paid more for their stuff so things like this didn't happen to me.... I am very frustrated.

I suspect that when "preparing backup", Time MAchine is actually syncing local snapshots..

Time machine and Lion

So... it would seem that my MBA has completed a backup and has calmed itself down...

I can offer no explanation as to what possessed it to work. Now when I click 'backup now' it does a typically small backup with no problems...

Does anyone think this will be fixed via a software update from Lion?

Mine is extremely slow as noted in this thread...

Or will I have to change something in the settings as a few on this thread have done?

Thanks in advance...

My problem solved

I got my new iMac on Friday with OS Lion (love it ). Plugged in my brand new 2tb "G-Drive" external hdd and started Time Machine (about 200 gb's of files on top of OS). Like lots of users here, I too had problems. It took about 8 hours to complete an initial back up (using firewire 800). I also noticed that the G-Drive was extremely noisy while writing to the drive (as if it was having a hard time writing / stuttering). After the initial back up, the hourly backups were so slow, that it wouldn't finish before the next hourly scheduled back up was due.

I called Apple Support. They told me to "erase/re-format" the G-Drive using my Mac with OS Lion. Although the G-Drive was "pre-formatted" with Mac OS extended, I was told that Lion sometimes has problems writing to it, unless formatted with Lion.

I did as instructed (erased G-Drive and reformatted to OS Extended Journaled) and started Time Machine again. This time it worked flawlessly - the G-Drive was no longer noisy either - just fan noise and quiet while writing info. Entire initial backup took about 2 hours. Hourly backups are quick - finishes in minutes.

Hope erasing/re-formatting helps someone else too.

Re-indexed Mac, re-formatted drive, did clean backup - still same.