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Snow Leopard SLOW TIME MACHINE

C

chefwong

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 17, 2008
470
32
24hrs and still running with 10 gigs left...
My Time Machine has been running. Sofar 156gbs has been processed to my Lacie via FW800 . It has taken at least 24hrs to run and it is still running.

Did a quick search and there seems to be various threads on the Apple Forums. Some say the initial TM is slow, subsequents are quick.


How are you experiances with Time Machine and SL ?

I thought maybe it was some weird bug and how the DB was dealing with Leopard to SL. So I ended up formatting my TM drive and re-ran. Still just as slow....as MOLASSES.
 
Mossberg in his review indicated a similar TM problem with his initial SL backup which was caused by there being a corrupted backup in his existing TM archive.
 
CWallace said:
I reformatted my TM store before I started the backup.
Click to expand...

Is it a locally connected drive or are you doing it over SMB? There were some threads a few days ago about people having issues with SMB TM hack backups after upgrading to 10.6.0.

Personally I back up over gigabit LAN to an HP EX485 mediasmart and it's still working plenty fast after 10.6.0 upgrade, I didn't even have to reformat it.
 
Mine is on an USB2 local drive, Mac OS X 10.6.1.
Right now, i'm at 30 GB, after 14 hours. Only 120 GB left to go... this is crazy!
Note : the external drive in question is freshly formatted, and works well.
Can i interrupt the transfer and continue it later on?
 
I've interrupted the backup, restarted the computer, and it seems waayy faster now (13 GB in approx 30 mn). I've not restarted from scratch though, let's hope it's gonna be ok.
 
Reformatted my Time Machine before SL backup (as I didn't have enough space for Leopard and SL). Connected via USB. I think it didn't take more than 4 hours or so.
 
I also experienced this..

24 hours+ or so to process 500GB...
Activity monitor showed it running really slow on data transfer.

FW800 Drobo Raid 5 so should of been quicker.
On another note my Drobo is quicker under snow leopard 20% ish :)
 
Strange, the only time my Time Capsule slows down is when more than one machine is backing up to it at the same time. If anything, my backups are quite a bit faster in SL.
 
I had the same problem, I'm still in the process of deleting my old time machine backup folder.

It seemed like mds and mdworker were taking up a lot of cpu when my drive was unresponsive, so I added the time machine backup drive to the "do not index" list in spotlight (system preferences.) Mds and mdworker subsequently went to zero.

I guess it makes sense that trying to index every file time machine previously stored is slowing things down. It might even be indexing hard linked files multiple times, right?

I'll report back after I finish clearing out my old backup and try creating one on a fresh backups.backupdb folder.
 
I considered using Time Machine after upgrading to Snow Leopard but let's be honest, SuperDuper! is still the better option.
 
cbecker333 said:
...I'll report back after I finish clearing out my old backup and try creating one on a fresh backups.backupdb folder.
Click to expand...

MUCH BETTER. mdworker is still cranking between 0-25% but it doesn't seem to be as bad, and my backup completed the first 10gb in just 25 mins.

So, in the effort to resolve this slowness give it a try => System Prefs/Spotlight/Privacy and add your time machine drive to the list.

Please note i also did the pram/nvram reset (hold cmd+optn+p+r at boot) and the smc reset (power down, remove battery, hold power button 5 seconds) in my efforts to fix this, so one of those could have also had some impact.

Wrt Superduper vs Time Machine: personally I'd rather have the FREE solution that is totally hands-free (connect it and your backup goes!) Also, I've recovered my stuff from time machine using migration assistant and it worked beautifully. Do I also need to go into the fact that it keeps incremental backups going back years? Sorry for turning this into a Time Machine vs. Superduper! thread (well actually, that was wallaby) but I have to call this out when Time Machine is clearly the more flexible solution, with the single exception of boot-ability.
 
TimeMachine slowness fixed by adjusting Spotlight

I too was suffering from a ridiculously slow TimeMachine: my initial backup (still in progress) I estimated was going to take more than 5 days! Thanks to CBECKER333's previous posts, I just now tried removing the backup drive from the Spotlight list (go to System preferences > Spotlight > Privacy list). My attempt to do so generated an error of "unknown type" but I just dismissed the notifier and after that the speed went way up.

At the new improved rate, I estimate it will complete in about 6 hours.
 
randallbsmith said:
I too was suffering from a ridiculously slow TimeMachine: my initial backup (still in progress) I estimated was going to take more than 5 days! Thanks to CBECKER333's previous posts, I just now tried removing the backup drive from the Spotlight list (go to System preferences > Spotlight > Privacy list). My attempt to do so generated an error of "unknown type" but I just dismissed the notifier and after that the speed went way up.

At the new improved rate, I estimate it will complete in about 6 hours.
Click to expand...

Old thread but thought I would throw in my two bits in case someone gets here by Google like I did.

Once I removed the backup drive from Spotlight, Time Machine started transferring data to the drive 3-4x faster. I didn't even get the error encountered by the poster above.
 
I read somewhere that Finder can slow Time Machine to a crawl due to a bug.

The solution is to relaunch Finder before starting the backup (type killall Finder in the Terminal).
 
randallbsmith said:
I too was suffering from a ridiculously slow TimeMachine: my initial backup (still in progress) I estimated was going to take more than 5 days! Thanks to CBECKER333's previous posts, I just now tried removing the backup drive from the Spotlight list (go to System preferences > Spotlight > Privacy list). My attempt to do so generated an error of "unknown type" but I just dismissed the notifier and after that the speed went way up.

At the new improved rate, I estimate it will complete in about 6 hours.
Click to expand...

I was having the slow backup problem, and this worked for me. Thanks!
 
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