Time Machine = Molasses

[schmendrick]

I'm in the middle of an adventure involving my 2019 21.5" iMac that requires me to upgrade to Big Sur from Mojave. I'm doing a Time Machine backup as I type. It's directly connected to my iMac.

This is the third TM backup I've done in two weeks, and each one has taken in excess of TEN HOURS.

Am I an outlier?

 

[Apple_Robert]

I highly suggest you start using Carbon Copy Cloner. It is lightning fast, easy to use, stable, and dependable. There is a 30 day trial.

Carbon Copy Cloner | macOS Backup Software | Bombich Software

bombich.com

My CCC backups take less than 15 minutes.

 

[Fishrrman]

CarbonCopyCloner.

 

[AppleSmack]

I'm in the middle of an adventure involving my 2019 21.5" iMac that requires me to upgrade to Big Sur from Mojave. I'm doing a Time Machine backup as I type. It's directly connected to my iMac.

This is the third TM backup I've done in two weeks, and each one has taken in excess of TEN HOURS.

Am I an outlier?

Not an outlier. There are several factors at play:

- USB 3 or USB 2 external HD?
- if your USB drive uses SMR, it's slow on writes. You're likely to have an SMR drive if it's a single 2.5 inch drive and capacity of 4TB.
- if you're backing up occasionally, there's more to scan and then write each time. Just leave it plugged in to do its thing as you work. If you ever need to restore, Migration Assistant lets you choose the point in time from your Time Machine backup.

Or just use the free trial of CCC / Superduper / Chronosync - and then buy one as part of your backup strategy if necessary.

You could even just clone by booting into Recovery and then use Disk Utility.

Good luck, and please update us with how it goes!

 

[madrich]

I'm in the middle of an adventure involving my 2019 21.5" iMac that requires me to upgrade to Big Sur from Mojave. I'm doing a Time Machine backup as I type. It's directly connected to my iMac.

This is the third TM backup I've done in two weeks, and each one has taken in excess of TEN HOURS.

Am I an outlier?

My only suggestion is that maybe the TM disk is becoming crowded and perhaps running out of space, therefore maybe you should delete a few old backups (always delete the oldest first.)

This may also help, but would disable wireless backups.

https://www.macworld.com/article/31...psule-as-an-ethernet-only-storage-device.html

 

[MisterSavage]

Are you using anti virus software? That could be a cause.

If Time Machine is slow on Mac

If a Time Machine backup on your Mac is slow, try these suggestions.

support.apple.com

 

[schmendrick]

My only suggestion is that maybe the TM disk is becoming crowded and perhaps running out of space, therefore maybe you should delete a few old backups (always delete the oldest first.)

This may also help, but would disable wireless backups.

https://www.macworld.com/article/31...psule-as-an-ethernet-only-storage-device.html

Every time (2? 3?) I've done a TM backup, I've a) Had it connected directly to my iMac, and b) Erased the drive before proceeding.
I have to do yet another one this week.

 

[madrich]

Every time (2? 3?) I've done a TM backup, I've a) Had it connected directly to my iMac, and b) Erased the drive before proceeding.
I have to do yet another one this week.

Erasing the drive means you are starting TM backup from scratch, whereas if there were some prior sparsebundle backups it would retain the files that were not changed with the latest backup. Further the spotlight index will reset when you erase the entire TM drive. Spotlight is the search engine built into OS X, and anytime it indexes drive data it can slow down a Mac. This is typically worse after reboots between major file system changes when the index is rebuilt, a major system update, or when another hard drive full of stuff is connected to the Mac.Oct 11, 2012

Also the link I provided you to convert the TM to an ethernet connection is not the same as being connected direct to the your Mac, it is faster than the latter because the wireless transfer function is completely turned off with data transfer exclusively only between the TM router and your computer via cable.

 

[schmendrick]

Thank you for this. I'm constantly blown away by the generosity of people here to shine light on stuff. Much appreciated.

My most recent TM backup was flawed. I lost documents, emails, files and folders. Lovely.

 

[madrich]

Sorry to hear. I remember reading how some people who thought they lost everything were able to recover it with a third party software program, but I do not remember the name. Perhaps googling disk recovery will help, or somebody reading this post.

 

[panjandrum]

Do not ever rely on Time Machine as you only backup. While it is built-in and extremely handy, it is also woefully unreliable. Like others have mentioned, spring for the very reasonably priced CCC. With the price of today's drives get yourself two backup destinations; attach one all the time and use Time Machine for that one. Use the other as an off-site and use CCC for that one. Say once a month or so (interval is up to you). At that point you are finally pretty safe. The general rules: 1) Primary storage plus 2 backups, one offsite. 2) Two different pieces of backup software in case one of them turns out to to be flawed. Use the most reliable software for your offsite backup.

 

[BigMcGuire]

Is it a 5200rpm drive??? Even on the old Mac OS Journaled Time Machine, the most my 200+ GB system would take is maybe 4 hours for the initial.

With AFPS formatting (for my spinners) ... it flies ... easily 3-4x faster in my experience.