Hi.
So I'm trying to backup my 2011 MBP - 10.7.2
Its been a while, so I've got around 57GB to backup..
Its taking ages.. Like 72KB in 5min ages. Seems to be around 10KB every minute???
Im using a bus powered OWC Mercury Elite Pro on FW800.
Any ideas? Ive never had a problem with this previously.
TM can be a pain at times. If you have a finder window open on the root of the volume you are backing up to, close it! Turn off Spotlight indexing of the volume you are backing up to and your speeds will go back to normal. Before going any further, mount the volume you normally back up to so that "Time Machine Backups" is showing on your desktop. Use Disk Utility to check the volume and if it gets lost, hangs or goes into "deep traversal" delete it and start over. It's better to start fresh backing up hundreds of Gig than to let TM sit there and spin for weeks only to find when you need it that nothing is really backed up.
Just so you know, I use TM backup to a LaCie FW drive and to a WD usb drive plugged into a Time Capsule. When I upgraded my HDD, before I learned about how easy it was to use CCC, I started a "fresh new" TM backup and was able to successfully use it to migrate when installing to my new HDD. I use Time Machine editor to make my backups happen daily at 3am. This way the "TM clock" isn't always spinning when I'm sitting at my Mac.
I have had more than two occasions where Time Machine data was too corrupt to allow a restore. In one case, the power supply in my 1st gen Time Capsule died and I had to get it replaced by Apple. While it was out for repair, my daughter's HDD got wiped and her files were lost forever. On another occasion, my wife had been backing up via 802.11g and when her HDD got wiped, her backup was so badly corrupted nothing could be restored. We had to resort to restoring from crashplan's servers. In another instance, I was having problems with TM on my Macbook and Apple support told me to delete the old TM backup and start over. It's not such a big deal as long as your HDD doesn't die before the new backup is finished.
The bottom line is NEVER rely on a single TM backup whether local or network as your only backup. Never allow Spotlight to index the TM backup as it will make the backup so slow it may never finish.
