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macbook123

macrumors 68000
Original poster
My RMBP has been trying to back up to Time Machine on a Seagate USB 3.0 drive for the last 12 hours. It has successfully transferred 13.7 GB's , and has about 75 GB to go. I've never had this problem before with backups from the same computer to the same external drive. What could be going on? Do I really need to wait 3 days for this to finish?
 
It took about 8 hours for my first TM backup to run -- 150GB worth. And that was over a network drive. USB 3 should be way faster.

I assume you are plugging in the drive directly to the laptop? No hubs or such that could be an issue?

Trying copying a bunch of finally to the drive manually and see how long it takes. That will give you an idea if it's the drive or something else.
 
On my rMBP, I backed up 90GB in around an hour with a G-Drive firewire800 drive connected to a thunderbolt port with an adapter cable. This should be slower than your USB 3.0.

Check your time machine preferences. Under options, I excluded system files and applications. At first I had another disk listed that wasn't indexed. It sat for a long time preparing to do the backup. I excluded the disk and it zipped along after that.

Since your transfer is in progress, I'm wondering if your disk isn't fully indexed and it's causing a delay.
 
That does seem WAY slow.

What version of Lion/ML are you using? Apple did an update a few months back (Sep I think) which fixed a bug that was causing ultra slow TM backups. I had a similar problem and the update fixed it.
 
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