Time Machine Issues

[Mystic Eddy]

Firstly, my backups to an external USB 3.0 drive are now extremely slow on my MBPr Late 2013. I've recently upgraded to Sierra GM to see if this solved the issue, but it hasn't.
Secondly, backups to my AirPort ac Time Capsule don't seem to get anywhere - I left it overnight on preparing backup and it was the same over 12 hours later. Looking in the console log, there's a lot of entries for the following: "AFP_VFS afpfs_vnop_ioctl:afpfs_FindForkRef failed -1".

Has anyone got any ideas what I can do to at least speed up the backups to my external drive? It used to zip along at a decent speed, but it took over 24 hours to complete the most recent backup of 300GB. I've also used the sudo command to stop the throttling of the Time Machine process, but the Time Capsule still gets stuck on Preparing Backup... with Activity Monitor showing high CPU usage but no network activity indicating read/write on the network drive.

 

[Carlanga]

If you are backing up 300GB even on USB 3 it will take some time plus if the machine is waking up for some bring else or needing something else it will prob slow the backup as well.

Could it be that is not finding the location of the network backup?

 

[JohnDS]

See if this helps: http://pondini.org/TM/D1.html

 

[Mystic Eddy]

I tried the steps JohnDS linked to, which has resolved the external drive backup speed. It now takes less than 4 hours to do a full backup. Much better! However, the AirPort TC worked initially, but the Time Machine app seems to be losing connection to the drive, even though I can access it in Finder and read/write to it; and it also appears in the TC app as a connected drive.
Cancelling a backup in progress to the TC and restarting it results in more console errors as in my original post. The only way to get round this is to delete the TC plist in Library and setup TM again. A big pain in the butt!

 

[JohnDS]

Check your energy saver prefs to uncheck "put hard drives to sleep" and check "wake for wifi access" and "enable power nap".

 

[Mystic Eddy]

Check your energy saver prefs to uncheck "put hard drives to sleep" and check "wake for wifi access" and "enable power nap".

Yep, they're already like that. I've erased the TC and re-added it to my network. Still throwing up the AFP errors when attempting a second backup to the drive. Only noticed it by chance the other week as my MBP was getting ridiculously hot doing not very much, then dug deeper into the logs and saw the process going crazy.

 

[JohnDS]

Check the internal hard drive on the Mac by going to Disk Utility, clicking on MacIntosh HD in the left panel and then on Verify Disk or First Aid.

 

[Mystic Eddy]

Thanks for the reply. There were some errors with the SSD in my Mac; now verified as OK and fixed. I'm leaning towards an AFP problem as the read/write speeds from the Mac to TC are in excess of 35MBps over WiFi. Shame I can't repair AFP!

 

[JohnDS]

Try an ethernet connection to the TC.

 

[Mystic Eddy]

I'll have to source a thunderbolt to ethernet adapter and try that. Thanks!

 

[Mystic Eddy]

Just to put my findings out there. Didn't need to source a Thunderbolt > Ethernet adapter in the end. Found that Sophos AV's 'On Access Scanner' was for some reason or other stalling the backup from ever completing, obfuscating the network path to the Time Capsule. Weird! OAS is now disabled and backups completed with haste! It's odd as I've always had Sophos installed since I got the TC is 2014 so can't understand why it's only recently began its shenanigans.

 

[RnR]

Just to put my findings out there. Didn't need to source a Thunderbolt > Ethernet adapter in the end. Found that Sophos AV's 'On Access Scanner' was for some reason or other stalling the backup from ever completing, obfuscating the network path to the Time Capsule. Weird! OAS is now disabled and backups completed with haste! It's odd as I've always had Sophos installed since I got the TC is 2014 so can't understand why it's only recently began its shenanigans.

Yep, same as. Removed Sophos and TC is backing up as normal. Harmony returned!