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Time Machine taking DAYS for initial backup! What the heck?!

M

mca7

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 28, 2007
55
0
When I backed up my personal imac with a firewire 400 external hard drive it was talking about an hour per gig. I stopped and started it a few times and then it finished backing up 110gb in about 3 hours.

Now my my fathers imac, his Time Machine is doing the same thing, granted he has a 500gb usb hd but at this rate it will take 2 days to back up. It is moving soooooo slow.

Anyone else experiencing god awful initial backup times?
 
Peace

Peace

Cancelled
Apr 1, 2005
19,546
4,556
Space The Only Frontier
When time machine does it first backup it backs up the whole system.So.

When it's copying data and your playing with the computer the backupd process has to compete with your computer usage.Everytime you change something during the first backup time machine must start fresh due to data changing while you play on the computer.

Do not use the computer during the initial time machine back up.
It will go faster that way.
 
M

mca7

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 28, 2007
55
0
its usb 2. and i haven't been on the computer all day and night and it is still taking forever
 
hcuar

hcuar

macrumors 65816
Jul 23, 2004
1,065
0
Dallas
Mine kept failing when it was attempting to backup my System and Application folder. I disabled those two folders and it works perfectly now. I believe it's currently bugged. However, I really don't care if either of those two folders are backed up. I only want my home directories saved.

give that a try.
 
rushmere

rushmere

macrumors 6502
Jul 28, 2006
482
242
New Zealand
I switched on an external USB2 hard drive almost as soon as I'd finished installing Leopard, and it churned away for more than 10 hours backing up my 120Gb of data.

Today, I switched off Time Machine, reformatted the external drive and started again. The disk had other old data on it, and I decided to make a clean start and use the disk exclusively for Time Machine. It took less than 2 hours to finish the first complete backup this time.

Perhaps it was slow first time because I was playing around with Leopard so much, or perhaps because it was still indexing the hard drive for Spotlight.
 
M

mca7

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 28, 2007
55
0
hcuar said:
Mine kept failing when it was attempting to backup my System and Application folder. I disabled those two folders and it works perfectly now. I believe it's currently bugged. However, I really don't care if either of those two folders are backed up. I only want my home directories saved.

give that a try.
Click to expand...

That did it! Thank you man! Its backing up WAYYY faster. It backed up in 3 min what it took 3 hours to do! Once it is done, i'll throw those two folders back on and see how long it takes for those to backup.
Thanks again!
 
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