Time Machine Concern

[MUBiomed]

I have been using a 1TB Time Capsule for a time machine backup of my three systems. Lately it seems to be taking forever to index, backup, and "cleaning up" with time machine. I have been using the same backup ".sparsebundle" for each system for around 1 year. Is this a bad idea? Should I delete these and start "new" backup files for each of the systems or is something else going on?


Thank you for any advice with this...

 

[flyfish29]

I think we need more info such as....

• How much data is on each of the three systems you are backing up to the 1TB?

• Have you downloaded or added a significant amount of files to any of the three machines lately which may make the backups take longer?

• With three machines I wonder if the backups are overlapping at times and more than one machine is trying to backup at once?? I am not sure how that works and how time machine sorts that out. Perhaps someone else can speak to that.

 

[MUBiomed]

Except for the MBA I am syncing around 300GB from the other two systems....

There has not been a sudden data increase, usually only 1-2Gb increase at a time.

I staggered the automatic updates for the mac mini and iMac so that they will not update on top of one another, and obviously the laptop is not powered on all the time so it is not interfering the majority of the time.


"Indexing" and "cleaning up" seem to take an inordinate amount of time still

 

[flyfish29]

How did you stagger the backups?

My best guess is that since your disk is likely filling up or close to full it takes more time to clean things up and organize things on the time capsule.

How long is "forever" to index/clean up by the way?

 

[MUBiomed]

I didn't realize that you were not familiar with the universal "forever" unit. which is generally equal to around 30-40 minutes sometimes.

There is 264 GB still available on the 1TB TC btw

 

[flyfish29]

I didn't realize that you were not familiar with the universal "forever" unit. which is generally equal to around 30-40 minutes sometimes.

I should teach this to my second and third grade students!!

So the fact that you have so much space shoots down that theory!

Have you checked your time machine backups to be sure they are backing up correctly? In other words- have you gone back and tried to restore some files and such on each machine? I would say if it is backing up correctly then I would not redo your backup.

(by the way-Does your user name MU stand for Missouri?)

 

[RHVC59]

For what it is worth, I have a 500 gig Time Capsule that seems to run a bit quicker since the last firmware update to 7.5.2. but I am just backing up in MBP to a time machine on my Drobo that is attached by wire to the Time Capsule.

 

[flyfish29]

I did forget there was a firmware upgrade in the last two weeks to the time capsule. I agree that it did speed things up. Perhaps that could help you? I noticed my time capsule had a yellow light and I used the time capsule software to upgrade the firmware.