Mid 2011 iMac with SSD and HDD - VERY slow Time Machine

[johnfkitchen]

Has anyone else experienced Time Machine taking hours to back up even small amounts of data?

Over in the Apple Discussions, a number of iMac owners with SSDs are reporting this problem, and so far, no solution has been posted. I, and others, are working with AppleCare, but no progress in the last two weeks.

In my case, I'm seeing typical backups taking 3 to 4 hours, with less than 100 megabytes backed up. Yes, that's megabytes. But I am seeing hundreds of thousand of files backed up according to the system.log viewed via Console, filtered by the string "backupd". The number of files is extraordinarily consistent, backup to backup, though the amount of data varies widely.

If you have experienced this and have a solution, please let us know. If you have the problem, please make sure you contact AppleCare.

Thanks!

 

[T.Verhoeven]

Same here, It backs up at bytes! per second, not even kb's...

 

[johnfkitchen]

What is Apple telling you? Any good news?

 

[basher]

I had the same issue. The first TM backup would move fast. About 3GB per minute. Then the following incremental backups would take about 45 minutes to back up 28MB.

After fiddling with things causing a deep traversal fixed the issue.

Take a look here for more ideas and some troubleshooting.

http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html​

 

[johnfkitchen]

Deep traversal didn't fix the problem for me, unfortunately, and others report that if it helps, the relief is brief. Did you find that deep traversal provided a permanent fix?

I'm seeing typically hundreds of IOPS while TM is running and my normal fast iMac gets sluggish. Since TM is running almost all the time, it's sluggish very often.

 

[FrankHahn]

Right after I got my first Time Capsule, I noticed that the Time Machine for backup was extremely slow on wired network. However, when I disconnected the eternet cable and turned on the airport, the Time Machine started to run normally.

I do not know if the slowness encountered by some people here was caused by the wired network. If you rely on a wired network for backup using the Time Mahine, then turn to a wireless network.

 

[johnfkitchen]

My (slow) Time Machine backups are direct to an external drive connected via USB

 

[basher]

TM backups have been fast since the deep traversal. It's been over 3 weeks and they are very quick.

 

[T.Verhoeven]

What is Apple telling you? Any good news?

They told me it was probable my external HDD (which clearly isn't the problem here..)

 

[johnfkitchen]

I have tried two different external USB drives as Time Machine targets and get the same symptoms on both

 

[filmotheklown]

SSD and Timemachine Resolved?

Has this been resolved ??

I've got an iMac 2011 with SSD.
I'm backing up over the network to Lion Server via gigabit ethernet.
Other machines on our network are not showing this problem. They have HHDs.

Back up is super slow, hours to just do a few MB.

'basher' can you deep link the solution you found. The current link is 404ing.

Here are some logs. One thing I've noticed is that it says "Copied 42640 files" from my drive every time it does a backup. That seems like a lot. Needless to say, I'm not changing 42K files every few hours...

Feb 17 16:51:46 : Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Feb 17 16:51:47 : 2012-02-17 16:51:47.000 FindSystemFiles[8265:907] Looking for system packages
Feb 17 16:51:47 : 2012-02-17 16:51:47.086 FindSystemFiles[8265:907] Finding system files...
Feb 17 16:51:47 : 2012-02-17 16:51:47.981 FindSystemFiles[8265:907] Writing system path cache.
Feb 17 16:54:00 : No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.80 GB requested (including padding), 166.47 GB available
Feb 17 17:10:25 : Copied 42640 files (36.2 MB) from volume SlideWhisle.
Feb 17 17:12:59 : No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.76 GB requested (including padding), 166.47 GB available
Feb 17 17:25:32 : Copied 42644 files (63.7 MB) from volume SlideWhisle.
Feb 17 17:31:00 : Starting post-backup thinning

Every back up seems to be for 42K files irrespective of file size. Here are two other runs from today:

Feb 17 13:27:13 : Copied 42583 files (699.2 MB) from volume SlideWhisle.
Feb 17 13:29:43 : No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.76 GB requested (including padding), 166.51 GB available
Feb 17 13:42:31 : Copied 42581 files (35.7 MB) from volume SlideWhisle.


Feb 17 09:11:40 : Copied 42291 files (363.5 MB) from volume SlideWhisle.
Feb 17 09:14:03 : No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.76 GB requested (including padding), 166.54 GB available
Feb 17 09:14:49 : Copied 2832 files (1 KB) from volume SlideWhisle.