Painfully Slow Time Machine Everyone

[thinkdiff89]

Hey everyone, I'm attempting to restore one of my Macs (just my files, not the OS too), via Time Machine and it's been painfully slow. It's been at '28 minutes remaining' (halfway) for about 16 hours. I'm restoring two user accounts totaling about 250GB.

I know this can be normal, but it's just sitting there and my G-Drive is not even flashing. Is it time to just Cancel or restart? I'm running the Big Sur 11.0.1 beta. My Mac is also running quite hot and I don't hear the fan, so I'm not loving that. Thanks for any thoughts!

 

[nothingtoseehere]

I hope there will be helpful answers as I cannot really help - I once tried a recovery but it was so incredibly slow... Since then, I back up my files on a "normal" drive (actually on a SD card), and hope that I never ever will have to restore the OS, as Time Machine seems close to unusable.

 

[thinkdiff89]

I hope there will be helpful answers as I cannot really help - I once tried a recovery but it was so incredibly slow... Since then, I back up my files on a "normal" drive (actually on a SD card), and hope that I never ever will have to restore the OS, as Time Machine seems close to unusable.

Thanks for the input! Yeah, Time Machine (backup up and restoring) seems like a weak spot for macOS still. It would just be nice if TM/Migration Assistant provide more visibility into the process, especially if it appears to be stalling.

 

[AppleSmack]

If you're testing beta OS releases, you'd be better off using CCC/Super Duper/Chronosync. And if your user files are important, I wouldn't even be using a beta.

 

[thinkdiff89]

If you're testing beta OS releases, you'd be better off using CCC/Super Duper/Chronosync. And if your user files are important, I wouldn't even be using a beta.

Thanks for the other tools to consider! And yeah, I made sure to have a backup pre-Big Sur in case I ran into issues.

 

[jzuena]

I paid for CCC in order to unlock the ability to schedule full drive backups nightly. Time Machine is good for restoring a small number of files or for going back multiple revisions on a file, but for bulk restores its too slow.

 

[Fishrrman]

Here I go again (just like an ol' broken record):
In the future, use either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper.
If you were using them, you wouldn't be having these problems now.