Restoring my MacBook Pro from a TC Backup is painfully slow

[AdamA9]

Hey,

My MacBook Pro has been in for repair. I had a flashing square on the Touch Bar by the power button and Apple had to replace the whole top case. For some reason, they wiped my Hard Drive, no idea why.

However, not a problem as I have a backup. Little did I know just how painful restoring would be.

I have a 4TB Time Capsule, connected via Ethernet from the LAN port to my MacBook (using a Ethernet to USB-C dongle). The backup is ~400 GB and right now is predicted to finish in 39 hours with a transfer rate of a whooping 3 MB/s.

This cannot be right, surely? I've restarted this restore about five times now. Moving from WAN to LAN. Swapping from 'restore from backup' using CMD+R on a reboot to completely wiping and setting up as a new user from a backup.

Nothing is making this any quicker. Why am I only seeing 3 MB/s transfer speeds? Is there anything I'm potentially doing wrong? This is a work machine and this is one day lost trying to get this working.

In the time writing this the time has gone up to 41 hours and 4 minutes. Increasing all the time. At this rate, I won't be back at work until next week...
[doublepost=1558451211][/doublepost]EDIT: 12 minutes later, and it's now 47h3m at 2 MB/s so either something is really wrong, or I've messed up somehow. The timer should be going down, not up as it has been for the past few hours.

 

[DeanL]

Yeah... The Time Capsule can act like trash sometimes and often acts erratically and so does Time Machine.
I had to restore 250 GB recently as well on my MacBook Pro from a NVMe USB-C SSD whose speeds topped 950 MB/s in real life yet it took about 20 minutes to restore it as opposed to the 5 minutes it should have taken.
Same thing with backing up: it can take up to an hour backing up my computer for the first time while it should take only minutes.

Time Machine will probably be revamped in the next version of macOS as it is old, not very efficient and doesn't even support APFS.

 

[AdamA9]

Hmmm...

I don't know what to do. Since my original post the estimate is now at 69 hours to complete. It's not even showing the data transfer speed anymore.

Is it ****ed, or should I just leave it for a week and hope it eventually completes? I need to get a better storage solution as this is dreadful.

 

[Howard2k]

I've found Time Machine to be great. It hasn't given me problems and has saved my ass many times.

You shouldn't be using the WAN port. That's alarming . Please can you describe the setup.
You also need to ensure that you're using a 1Gb/s Ethernet connection, not a 10Mb/s or 100Mb/s. I would confirm that too.

I usually just do it over wifi, but a large backup/restore I would do over Ethernet. Ideally I would have my MBPro wired to my switch, and my NAS wired to my switch, and transfer data between the two of them, both running 1Gb/s connections.

The first USB/Ethernet adaptor I bought would not connect faster than 100Mb/s, which is a little pedestrian. I would certainly verify how yours is connecting.

 

[Lee_Bo]

Are either of the drives spinning drives? I've seen backups and restores where one of the drives were spinning drives take forever.

 

[Howard2k]

Are either of the drives spinning drives? I've seen backups and restores where one of the drives were spinning drives take forever.

Time Machine supports HDDs.

 

[Lee_Bo]

Time Machine supports HDDs.

Oh, I didn't say they weren't supported. But a recent restore from a SSD TM drive to my MBP with SSD only took about an hour. I'm also not backing up or restoring over network. Drives are physically connected.

 

[AdamA9]

I've found Time Machine to be great. It hasn't given me problems and has saved my ass many times.

You shouldn't be using the WAN port. That's alarming . Please can you describe the setup.
You also need to ensure that you're using a 1Gb/s Ethernet connection, not a 10Mb/s or 100Mb/s. I would confirm that too.

I usually just do it over wifi, but a large backup/restore I would do over Ethernet. Ideally I would have my MBPro wired to my switch, and my NAS wired to my switch, and transfer data between the two of them, both running 1Gb/s connections.

The first USB/Ethernet adaptor I bought would not connect faster than 100Mb/s, which is a little pedestrian. I would certainly verify how yours is connecting.

Hey, so I have a cat 5 ethernet cable coming from the LAN port of the time capsule into a dongle converting the ethernet to USB-C

How do I know what speed connection it is?

It was up to 98 hours so I've cancelled it. Frankly the thing is going out the window soon.
[doublepost=1558464180][/doublepost]Image for reference. Assuming I've not done anything stupid? And yes I've unplugged it for now. That's not the issue

 

[Howard2k]

We all do lots of stupid things! At least I do.

Go into System Preferences, network, and you will see your USB adaptor. What is that reporting? Can you get a screenshot? Apologies I cannot recall exactly where you will find the connection speed.

 

[AdamA9]

We all do lots of stupid things! At least I do.

Go into System Preferences, network, and you will see your USB adaptor. What is that reporting? Can you get a screenshot? Apologies I cannot recall exactly where you will find the connection speed.

I don't think I can get there? This is a mac that isn't setup? Assume you need me to setup a user account first?

 

[DeanL]

I don't think I can get there? This is a mac that isn't setup? Assume you need me to setup a user account first?

I'm not sure how much you love your Time Capsule, but you might have to take out the hard drive and put it in an external enclosure if nothing else works.

 

[Kenny99]

From your attached picture your adapter Is a Belkin F2CU40 the reviews for this are bad.I also see that you have a USB port on your backup drive, have you tried using it?

 

[Howard2k]

I don't think I can get there? This is a mac that isn't setup? Assume you need me to setup a user account first?

Hmm, from the initial setup, I am not sure. The TC might have a page that shows the status of the ports? I know most routers do (but infuriatingly, not all).


As Kenny mentions, the reviews on that adaptor are poor. I picked up a cheap one from Best Buy which was trash (not Belkin). I tried a second brand and it's been spectacular. I use USB-A not USB-C though so mine won't work for you. But ultimately I would buy a replacement and try it out and see if it's any better.

 

[DeanL]

From your attached picture your adapter Is a Belkin F2CU40 the reviews for this are bad.I also see that you have a USB port on your backup drive, have you tried using it?

The USB port on the Time Capsule can only be used to add external storage, not to plug it to a computer.

 

[AdamA9]

Hmm, from the initial setup, I am not sure. The TC might have a page that shows the status of the ports? I know most routers do (but infuriatingly, not all).


As Kenny mentions, the reviews on that adaptor are poor. I picked up a cheap one from Best Buy which was trash (not Belkin). I tried a second brand and it's been spectacular. I use USB-A not USB-C though so mine won't work for you. But ultimately I would buy a replacement and try it out and see if it's any better.

This has been absolutely fine backing up. And super fast transferring files manually onto the TC. I don't think it's the adapter as that has worked fine up until now and even so, should be capable of transferring >10 MB/s surely?
[doublepost=1558471368][/doublepost]Does it make a difference which side I plug into the mac?

 

[Howard2k]

This has been absolutely fine backing up. And super fast transferring files manually onto the TC. I don't think it's the adapter as that has worked fine up until now and even so, should be capable of transferring >10 MB/s surely?
[doublepost=1558471368][/doublepost]Does it make a difference which side I plug into the mac?

Shouldn’t make a difference which side. Wouldn’t hurt to try the other side though.
You could just let it run and see. Sometimes it says 10 hours and then drops suddenly.

 

[AdamA9]

Shouldn’t make a difference which side. Wouldn’t hurt to try the other side though.
You could just let it run and see. Sometimes it says 10 hours and then drops suddenly.

Okay so I tried the other side and the process was completely different. It didn't show the two user accounts and just seemed to be copying over data and not applications. Weird.

I left it last night, so it ran for about 8 hours and this morning was on 78 hours remaining. I'm going to leave it for another 24 hours and see if it improves at all...

I guess this is the push I needed to get a proper backup solution in place.

 

[MrGunnyPT]

Yeah... The Time Capsule can act like trash sometimes and often acts erratically and so does Time Machine.
I had to restore 250 GB recently as well on my MacBook Pro from a NVMe USB-C SSD whose speeds topped 950 MB/s in real life yet it took about 20 minutes to restore it as opposed to the 5 minutes it should have taken.
Same thing with backing up: it can take up to an hour backing up my computer for the first time while it should take only minutes.

Time Machine will probably be revamped in the next version of macOS as it is old, not very efficient and doesn't even support APFS.

Yeah I had about the same experience recently and it was painfully slow took me around 25 minutes via external NVMe

 

[solouki]

Hi,

I've got you all beat!

On my third CTO 2018 MBP (all of my 2018 MBP CTOs have experienced the same problems, including WiFi disconnects, bluetooth disconnects, 5K monitor disconnects, SMB-mounted RAID drive disconnects, SSD file corruptions, AirDrop failures, Software Update failures, Mac App Store update failures, Time Machine failures, Safari page load failures, ping failures, rsync failures, ssh failures, kernel panics, etc.), I attempted the initial Time Machine backup to a Time Capsule over 802.11ac 5GHz band with an extremely large signal-to-noise ratio (RSSI=-40dBm, Noise=-90dBm) five consecutive times, the first four times the Time Machine backup failed (due to WiFi disconnects experienced by the 2018 MBPs), the fifth time the initial backup was successful but it took over 5 and 1/2 days to complete! I suspect that the reason the initial backup of the 2018 MBP was so slow (and much, much slower than the initial TM backups for my 2016 MBP) was because the 2018 MBP was experiencing intermittent WiFi disconnects during the backup, it is just that for the fifth attempt these disconnects, while slowing the backup, did not cause it to fail as it did for the first four attempts.

Regards,
Solouki

 

[AdamA9]

This morning it was at 87h so about 9 hours ago. I got home from work and it's 1h 32m so something must have been causing it to have a wildly inaccurate reading. So far it has taken about 20h in total. Dreadful for 400 GB of data so if anyone can point me in the right direction for an SSD solution, that'd be great.

 

[LogicalApex]

I did a full Time Machine Restore 2 days ago to finally fully test my restore confidence in Time Machine. I backed up to my crappy NAS as I always do and did a restore via Ethernet of about 250GB or so (full machine restore).

It completed in about 6 hours or so, but the Time Machine estimated for me something in the range of 14 or 16 hours and it completed very early, but all seems good.

The fastest I would imagine are the following:
1. Direct attached backup storage
2. Remote via Ethernet
3. Remove via WiFi

I hope Apple updates Time Machine and offers open source support of some kind so we can install it on more devices...

 

[Bill Fitch]

How about attaching a external hard drive to your Time Machine using the usb3 port. Copying the backup to the external drive, then attaching the external drive to the Mac and restoring the backup. That would be quite quick.
Bill

 

[pshufd]

I have three USB 3.0 Time Machine disks (Western Digital MyBooks) and they aren't lightning quick but I'm not seeing anything like the numbers put out here. I recently upgraded my basement network to GB Ethernet (by replacing the CAT5 cables with CAT6 cables and adding a GB Switch) and it's very nice. It would be nice to get GB Ethernet to the living room but I'm not going to run wires through the ceiling an floor anytime soon.