Suggestions to Significantly Speed Up Time Machine Backup?

[Alvin777]

Hello Apple and Mac friends.

To attempt to make the Time Machine backup faster, on Terminal I executed:

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

but it's still slow. I plan to use this:

sudo renice -n -20 -p 565

but I might not be able to switch it back to the default coz' there's no enabled=1 with renice?
Please advise, recommendations are welcome.

God bless, stay safe.

 

[casperes1996]

but I might not be able to switch it back to the default coz' there's no enabled=1 with renice?

What do you mean there's no enabled=1 with renice? What is it you want to enable?
I don't see why you'd give the Time Machine process a lower nice value anyway. - Assuming that's what pid 565 is on your system when you run that.
It's a disk bound I/O process so giving it a larger CPU quantum or increase its priority.

Best way to speed up Time Machine is to set up exclusions for the things you don't need/want backed up and use a fast disk for it

 

[Alvin777]

What do you mean there's no enabled=1 with renice? What is it you want to enable?
I don't see why you'd give the Time Machine process a lower nice value anyway. - Assuming that's what pid 565 is on your system when you run that.
It's a disk bound I/O process so giving it a larger CPU quantum or increase its priority.

Best way to speed up Time Machine is to set up exclusions for the things you don't need/want backed up and use a fast disk for it

Hi, thanks. I mean if execute:

sudo renice -n -20 -p 565

When the backup finishes how will I get it back to the default before I used renice?

 

[casperes1996]

Hi, thanks. I mean if execute:

sudo renice -n -20 -p 565

When the backup finishes how will I get it back to the default before I used renice?

A process’ default nice value is 0.
But based on what you’re writing here - Where did you get the value 565? The pid of a process is not static so if this is a value you saw from someone else online you can’t just copy that.
Also there really is no point to lowering the niceness of the backup process. It doesn’t need all that CPU time

I recommend you read the man page for nice - In general, when in doubt read the man page

 

[Alvin777]

Hi. I searched for faster ways for it to backup in Big Sur. I just got that value from an article, coz' it's already 3 days, running 24 hours (I don't shut down my iMac, I just let it sleep- an always on Mac and restart sometimes), and it's just backed up only 557GB of 984GB (backing up for the first), last time I backed up for the first time, it was only 16 hours:

https://www.deverman.org/command-line-hacks-speed-apple-timemachine-backups/

 

[casperes1996]

Hi. I searched for faster ways for it to backup in Big Sur. I just got that value from an article, coz' it's already 3 days, running 24 hours (I don't shut down my iMac, I just let it sleep- an always on Mac and restart sometimes), and it's just backed up only 557GB of 984GB (backing up for the first), last time I backed up for the first time, it was only 16 hours:

https://www.deverman.org/command-line-hacks-speed-apple-timemachine-backups/

Right so a key point in the article you link is this

To get the process id I just used activity monitor and looked for “backupd” in the Activity monitor.

That's the 565 value they're talking about there. The process ID. That value will not be the same every time. You need to find the process ID. The article says you can use Activity Monitor, and that's true, but easier is to use the command line for that too. You can run
ps -A | grep backup

And you'll get a list of processes including the letters "backup" and their pid on the far left. The last one is the one you just ran to get the list so ignore that one.

What disk are you backing up to? Is it a network drive? A USB hard drive? an SSD?

Feel free to experiment with renice but I highly doubt it'll help. It also won't hurt however, other than giving more CPU time to the backup process which probably doesn't needed but can easily be reverted by just running it again with 0 instead of -20.

Whenever you see a command you don't know in an article like that I recommend you at least take a quick glance at its man page to better understand what the command does so you don't get tricked into running something potentially harmful. To read the man page for a command you simply write
man <name of command>


so in this case you could write
man nice
to get the manual for nice.
[/QUOTE]