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mikepro

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 3, 2010
453
61
Anyone else experiencing slooow time machine backups after the ML upgrade? My backup to my 2TB Time capsule seems ridiculously slow. Takes forever at preparing backup, then finally determined 18GB needed, and had only backed 3GB after an hour. Last night I backed up over 100GB 10 times faster than this is going.


I have a 2010 15" Macbook pro with Crucial M4 SSD, 2TB latest gen Time Capsule, with full 300 Mbps wifi strength.

Oh well, guess I'll just let it run overnight and hope it improves...
 

Nicklaus

macrumors 6502
Jun 19, 2010
263
3
Winter Park
SOOOO CRAZY SLOW!!!! Much slower than yours mine has been running and its claims its only backed up 187Kb of 23GB. iStat says more data than that is moving around though it might just not be reporting correctly.
 

ATC

macrumors 65816
Apr 25, 2008
1,185
432
Canada
I haven't noticed any slowdowns in my TM backups. But I did do a clean install instead of an upgrade install of ML and got rid of a whole bunch of apps and stuff that were never being used. :cool:
 

benthewraith

macrumors 68040
May 27, 2006
3,140
143
Fort Lauderdale, FL
Anyone else experiencing slooow time machine backups after the ML upgrade? My backup to my 2TB Time capsule seems ridiculously slow. Takes forever at preparing backup, then finally determined 18GB needed, and had only backed 3GB after an hour. Last night I backed up over 100GB 10 times faster than this is going.


I have a 2010 15" Macbook pro with Crucial M4 SSD, 2TB latest gen Time Capsule, with full 300 Mbps wifi strength.

Oh well, guess I'll just let it run overnight and hope it improves...

Time Machine is doing a lot more than just backing up files. System files are being changed on the Time Machine.
 

jabalczar

macrumors member
Jul 22, 2011
61
0
I'm noticing the same. I thought there was a problem with my external hard drive. I only got the HD a month or so ago and backed up Lion (with the all the system files) quite fast. Now I'm backing up ML and it's taking hours and hours and I only have 60 GB total. At once point it was telling me 75 days to back up.

I took off encryption because it ground to a halt, but it's still very very slow compared to Lion.
 

Nishi100

macrumors 6502a
Mar 27, 2010
867
0
Mine's quite slow as well... I've already done the backup where is updates the system files changed in 10.8, which was OK.

This is just a routine backup and it's done 5KB of 1Gb - hasn't moved in the last 20 minutes. I think I'll just stop it and then start it again.

EDIT: I gave up and formatted my backup disk (not like I'd want to go back to Lion anyway) -- 10 hours now to backup 570gb of crap ... sounds about right.
 
Last edited:

mikepro

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 3, 2010
453
61
Will, checking on mine this morning and it is in stage "cleaning up". Still taking forever to clean up. I'll see how subsequent backups do.
 

hafr

macrumors 68030
Sep 21, 2011
2,743
9
The first backup after the ML install will take longer time than normal, considering the sheer amount of small files that will be verified, edited, moved, added and deleted.

I had 11 GBs to backup after the install (the install having been the only change made since the last backup...), and it took a while... But now, the backups are back to normal speed and size.
 

jacksam101

macrumors member
Dec 27, 2006
82
2
Crewe (UK)
Quite the reverse for me - set up a new Time Machine after upgrading to ML and it's backed the 1.2GB in around 6 hours; Last time I set it up with newly installed Lion it took nearly twice that.
 

fb0r

macrumors newbie
Jul 26, 2012
10
0
Sweden
My first backup took ages too. I think it's just Time Machine re-indexing your backed up files, sorting out which system files have changed since the previous backup etc. After completing the first backup (took me about an hour or so) after I installed ML I'm happy to say that Time Machine is working normally again for me.

Cheers, fb0r
 

AcesHigh87

macrumors 6502a
Jan 11, 2009
986
326
New Brunswick, Canada
Mine was slow at first but I assumed it was because Spotlight was trying to index all the changes at the same time. I just let spotlight finish and it ran a TM backup as fast as usual. It did take awhile because it was a lot of files to change but speed wise it was the same as always.
 

mikepro

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 3, 2010
453
61
Well, mine started last night at 10:58pm and finished this morning at 7:15am, for 18GB of data. :eek:

Had to leave for work, but left computer on, so I'll post how subsequent backups go, which should be much smaller.
 

jtc2

macrumors newbie
Jul 26, 2012
10
0
Wow...

I just upgraded my 27" iMac (mid 2010) to Mountain Lion. The first scheduled Time Machine backup since the upgrade started 12 hours ago and has only backed up 1.30GB of 10.65GB. So 4-5 days total???

The backup disk is on a Mac Mini on the same Gigabit network. My wife's MacBook Pro (still running Lion) backs up very quickly to the same network drive, as the iMac used to when it was running Lion.

I don't see a lot of disk activity on either the iMac or the backup drive, so it doesn't seem like it's indexing, converting files, etc.
 

Zetaprime

macrumors 65816
Dec 4, 2011
1,481
262
Ohio, US
Anyone else experiencing slooow time machine backups after the ML upgrade? My backup to my 2TB Time capsule seems ridiculously slow. Takes forever at preparing backup, then finally determined 18GB needed, and had only backed 3GB after an hour. Last night I backed up over 100GB 10 times faster than this is going.


I have a 2010 15" Macbook pro with Crucial M4 SSD, 2TB latest gen Time Capsule, with full 300 Mbps wifi strength.

Oh well, guess I'll just let it run overnight and hope it improves...

The first backup after installing Mountain Lion was much larger than usual (about 35 gigs ). But it proceeded at the usual speed. Subsequent backups have performed as before, though the icon doesn't spin during the cleanup phase like it used to. Or is that because with Power Nap closing the lid no longer interrupts the backup process, so the activity is no longer of any consequence?
 

Steve.P.JobsFan

macrumors 65816
Jan 27, 2010
1,010
613
Columbus
I just ran a TM backup. 20 minutes to backup 15 MB of data. My hard drive is one of the hard drives that have 2 USB connections for faster transfer. If one USB 2.0 port transfers at 480 MBit/S, then two would transfer at 960 MBit/S technically. But, seriously? 20 minutes for 15 MB of data? That's almost a horribly slow rate of 1MB per minute.


That's actually 0.75 or 3/4 of a megabyte per minute. Wow, is that slow.
 

Jeff Chen

macrumors member
Jun 16, 2009
70
3
It will be slow on the first backup, as so many files were modified during the upgrade. If you still get this kind of slow behavior in the future, it might be a problem. But right now, it might be alright.
 

jtc2

macrumors newbie
Jul 26, 2012
10
0
That didn't help...

I just upgraded my 27" iMac (mid 2010) to Mountain Lion. The first scheduled Time Machine backup since the upgrade started 12 hours ago and has only backed up 1.30GB of 10.65GB. So 4-5 days total???

The backup disk is on a Mac Mini on the same Gigabit network. My wife's MacBook Pro (still running Lion) backs up very quickly to the same network drive, as the iMac used to when it was running Lion.

I don't see a lot of disk activity on either the iMac or the backup drive, so it doesn't seem like it's indexing, converting files, etc.

So I decided to kill the backup and move the existing sparsebundle to a different drive, forcing the iMac to do a full backup from scratch. It has been running for about 9 hours now and has backed up 5.59GB out of 115.88GB. Just 6 days to go...
 

hafr

macrumors 68030
Sep 21, 2011
2,743
9
So I decided to kill the backup and move the existing sparsebundle to a different drive, forcing the iMac to do a full backup from scratch. It has been running for about 9 hours now and has backed up 5.59GB out of 115.88GB. Just 6 days to go...

Have you tried simply moving files from your computer to the disk, to rule out a bad connection? It sounds very strange... Unless you have gigabytes of very, very small files, but even then...
 

Benbikeman

macrumors 6502a
May 17, 2011
616
1
London, England
My first one after the ML update was 36Gb and was perhaps a little slower than normal. The backups since then have been normal size, normal speed.
 

kas23

macrumors 603
Oct 28, 2007
5,629
288
My TM back-up is around 17 GB and is incredibly slow too. It took around 10 minutes to "prepare the back-up" and now has been stuck on 1.8 MB for last 15 minutes. I suppose this first back-up is going to take all day/night.
 

jtc2

macrumors newbie
Jul 26, 2012
10
0
Have you tried simply moving files from your computer to the disk, to rule out a bad connection? It sounds very strange... Unless you have gigabytes of very, very small files, but even then...

Thanks for the suggestion. With the backup running, I copied a 10GB file from the iMac to the network backup drive, and it took about 4 minutes. The backup has been running for 19 hours and has only backed up 12GB out of 116GB. It still says 6 days to go.

This really feels like a Time Machine bug. I have used it for years and done many backups, and it has never taken anywhere near this long for this amount of data.
 
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