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time machine slow initial backup - fix

time machine - very slow first backup

I bought a 1TB time machine about a month ago. I followed all solutions offered on this forum: excluding time machine from spotlight indexing, doing a forced quit on Sophos Antivirus, connecting my macbook air directly using USB ethernet, setting USB ethernet as the first connection (system preferences, network, and moving usb ethernet to the top of the list), etc. Nothing seemed to be solving the problem. Even with all this, the activity monitor was showing data transfer at a very slow 55-65KB/sec range.

Today, I checked in Activity Monitor for all the programs that were sucking up CPU and discovered one titled "intercheck." I did a search for this and discovered that this was related to my Sophos Antivirus program. I went back to system preferences, and stopped Sophos from running. Voila - the backup speed went up to the 3-4MB/sec range in activity monitor. TM was taking 2 days for just 1.6GB; now it got the entire 70GB done in a few hours!!!
 
I unchecked my Symantec AV auto protect on System prefs and my initial backup sped up to 1.5gig/min from 10mb/min. Thanks for the tips!
 
I have kind of accepted that sometimes Time Machine just gets lost--especially if you have a system crash. It sometimes needs to rebuild the index to find its way--which can take a long time where all it shows is "preparing" You can often find some additional information on what exactly it is doing in the system log. I hate waiting for it to find its way but it eventually does and then runs fine and speedy again during the next run.
 
My backup stopped at 16.7GB and it's been one hour. The first 16GB was fast. But my USB external hard drive still shows data transfer.
 
Time Maching Running Slowly

Time Machine is being really stupid!

Okay i have a mac book pro, 200 GB, interal hard drive, 2 GB of ram, 2.4 GHZ

WD 1TB exernal hard drive, i have partitioned the external hard drive in to two parts, one that has 250GB named "time machine" the other of 750 named "My Book"

Time machine i let run all night for 12 hours, and it only copyed 58GB, this external hard drive is brand new, running on fire wire 400

formatted for mac os journled

i have no anti virus programs, and have deleted all back ups, excluded my other external drive named "My book" and it still takes for ever.

BTW i have no anti virus programs,

Help!
 
TonyTerjeson said:
Time Machine is being really stupid!

Okay i have a mac book pro, 200 GB, interal hard drive, 2 GB of ram, 2.4 GHZ

WD 1TB exernal hard drive, i have partitioned the external hard drive in to two parts, one that has 250GB named "time machine" the other of 750 named "My Book"

Time machine i let run all night for 12 hours, and it only copyed 58GB, this external hard drive is brand new, running on fire wire 400

formatted for mac os journled

i have no anti virus programs, and have deleted all back ups, excluded my other external drive named "My book" and it still takes for ever.

BTW i have no anti virus programs,

Help!
Click to expand...

Continued....

so i did some looking in actitity monitor, there was a program called 360demion or demion360, that was takeing up a lot of my cpu i just force quited that program and now data is transferd around 6-9MB per sec, :)

Go :apple:
 
Manual Formating

I found this post very useful, not because I had an autoprotect with my antivirus software, but instead because for whatever reason I had to MANUALLY format the external hard drive rather than letting time machine do it for me.

This changed my transfer rates from Mbs per minute to closer to 1 Gig per minute.

Manually formatting the drive was done by going to applications>utilities>disk utility

and then erase > volume format > mac OS extended (Journaled)

as was said above, partition data as needed. I didn't do any partitions.


thanks for the tip!!!!
 
Turn off Calculate All Sizes

I figured out I was doing something that was slowing it. I had the Finder window open to the Backups.backupdb folder, but I also had turned on Calculate All Sizes checked in Show View Options. Unclicking that made the pace of the backup speed up immensely.
 
similar problem

I had a similar problem, which was caused by Spotlight indexing my external backup drive at the same time that TM kicked in. Over the course of 3.5 hours, TM had only backed up 32MB of data. After reading through this thread, and ruling out all of the things that were not applicable to my circumstances, I pinpointed it to a corrupt indexing (or something) of my previous Backups.backupdb. Since it was a fairly new complete backup, and I just make an identical duplicate of my HD only a few days ago, I deleted the Backups.backupdb and started TM again. It seems to be working well now, backing up 4 GB or so already (it's not been very long).
 
thanks

renault4,

I joined macrumors just to thank you (and everyone else) for your post.

Listing the partition on my external dedicated to Time Machine as private in the spotlight preferences did it for me.

Thanks again.


and p.s. I'm pretty sure all these anti-virus softwares people are worse for system performance then most actual viruses.
 
It was crawling (12 hours and only 20 gigs) so all I did was check this forum and then exclude the volume from Spotlight (thought I had done that but I only excluded the other partition on the drive, smacks head!).

Anyway, the indexing immediately accelerated and its done 10 more gigs in the last 10 minutes or so, so it looks good.

Excellent forum!
 
Slow Backup with Time Machine

I just spent the last two days trying to get Time Machine to do an initial backup in a reasonable time frame. Since I had just bought my new Mac Pro, I called Apple support for some assistance. They had several ideas, but non worked. They did try, however.

A quick Google Search a few hours ago led me here. After reading the previous posts, I disabled spotlight, and for the first time Time Machine actually worked and did my first backup of 101 GB in about 40 minutes.

Thank you all very much!
 
Hello,

I have just started my initial TM backup with a brand new WD My Book Studio Edition II 2 TB drive. I am backing up from a MacBook Pro 2.8 GHz via FW800 and the external hard drive is configured to RAID 1 (mirrored). I'm getting speeds around 2-3 GB/min, which is considerably lower than what the FW800 port should allow for. Could this apparently slow speed be related to the fact that I am doing a mirrored backup?

Thanks!
 
3 gig/min is perfectly fine for TM. It's not making a simple copy. What's going on is a lot more complicated than that. Even Apple says the first backup is probably better done as an overnight job.

x T

seriouscolor said:
Hello,

I have just started my initial TM backup with a brand new WD My Book Studio Edition II 2 TB drive. I am backing up from a MacBook Pro 2.8 GHz via FW800 and the external hard drive is configured to RAID 1 (mirrored). I'm getting speeds around 2-3 GB/min, which is considerably lower than what the FW800 port should allow for. Could this apparently slow speed be related to the fact that I am doing a mirrored backup?

Thanks!
Click to expand...
 
hang while "preparing backup"?

very useful thread (although i haven't seen my own problem yet)

i have TM backing up to a TC. it worked fine for several months. BUT - hasn't backed up for 2 weeks. when it tries to back up my laptop (macbook pro) sits there with the tm icon spinning around, and if i click on it I see "preparing backup", which it does ad infinitum.

i tried turning off virus checking, excluding the TC from spotlight, etc., other items posted here. but to no avail.

i've also unplugged & reset teh tc.

any other thoughts?
 
cjeeper said:
very useful thread (although i haven't seen my own problem yet)

i have TM backing up to a TC. it worked fine for several months. BUT - hasn't backed up for 2 weeks. when it tries to back up my laptop (macbook pro) sits there with the tm icon spinning around, and if i click on it I see "preparing backup", which it does ad infinitum.

i tried turning off virus checking, excluding the TC from spotlight, etc., other items posted here. but to no avail.

i've also unplugged & reset teh tc.

any other thoughts?
Click to expand...

This thread should give you some ideas. In a nutshell, something interrupted Time Machine in the middle of a backup, maybe your machine went to sleep or there was a power outage, whatever. The result was a corrupted "inProgress" file.

I had a similar problem not long ago and I was able to make the fix. I don't remember whether I needed all the steps listed here. I think I just deleted the inProgress file then chose "Back Up Now" from the Time Machine menu. From there, I was good to go.

good luck

mt
 
Still slow

Well, I have a completely fresh installed Snow Leopard on my iMac 2.16 GHz, 250 GB harddisk and a newly formatted HFS (journaled) myBook (1TB) external USB2.0 connected directly to the iMac. No virus scanning software.

I made a complete backup, all external harddisk excluded.

It took two days to backup 67 GB from my internal HD to myBook. This is way too slow.

Any new aspects?

Greetings, Ronald
---
 
Why are people ruining their Macs by running Norton and other anti-virus programs? Are all of you people "switchers" who think you need that kind of horrible software to protect your system and give you crappy performance? Macs don't need anti-virus software! Just use a router with a good firewall, or utilize the built-in firewall in Snow Leopard.

In the many years I've owned Macs, never once have I installed anti-virus software and never once have I ever had anything bad happen. Anyone who tries to sell you anti-virus software for a Mac is scamming you. In my small office I have a Mac Pro (for myself) and my two office mates have Dells. They are constantly performing virus scans, registry fixes, and god knows what else while I happily continue working and producing. Windows software is nothing more than a conspiracy among IT folks who want job security.
 
Gargantua said:
It took two days to backup 67 GB from my internal HD to myBook. This is way too slow.---
Click to expand...

Two days is a bit long, but the first backup does take a long time. After this, it should be much faster as it will only backup anything that's been changed.

If it's a fresh install, then as you install large apps eg Adobe CS or MS office, there'll be a couple more long backup events.
 
I was shocked to discover on a new Time Machine backup to a new Seagate 1TB Desk Agent Firewire drive, that TM had only backed up 40 gigs over 9 hours overnight. I found this thread, but since I was not running any anti-virus, I broadened my thinking to turn of any extra "processes."

After I turned off Little Snitch and Spotlight, I am now flying on TM backup. Probably running 10 times faster. Thanks all.

-- Jeff
 
Spotlight : off

WOW!:eek: Seems like spotlight is the culprit. I have waited to upgrade my mac for almost two years and was eager to be able to use FW800, but seeing my first TM backup :mad: WTF?!?!

Anyway, read this thread a bit, disregarded the anti-virus stuff (on a mac :confused: ), and tried turning off spotlight. My transfer went from averaging out at 7.5 MB/s to 51 MB/s immediately.

Hopes this helps others in a similar situation.

Also on a side note, and maybe this needs another thread, does anyone know why FW 800 can be so irregular? I get speeds ranging from usb2 speeds (40MB/s) to almost double that (76MB/s) from the same drive to the same computer, transferring the same files. I have done things like repair permissions or repair the drive, and for the most part it doesnt seem to make a difference. i.e sometimes it is faster and sometimes it isnt, maybe a coincidence? I dont know.

Anyway, if anyone has an idea how i can get this FW 800 to run fast all the time, please let me know.
 
My 2 cents with TM. Here it is 2010 and still have similar issues with TM.

Finally got around to hooking up my FANTOM DRIVES G-Force GF1000EU 1TB USB 2.0/eSATA External Hard Drive Retail @ $100.99 purchased July of 2009 (9 months ago) from zipzoomfly.com. Oh well, at least I am backing up now.

Snow Leopard v10.6.2 + circa 2006 model Macbook white A1181 13 laptop" upgraded 2GB memory (MAX for this model) + a 500GB internal SATA drive. with 355GB of data used, 60% of it photos.

Very disappointing how slow the initial Time Machine backup was. TM backed up about 4GB per hour for 6 hours :( with 330 GB to go it would take another 80 hours. Yikes! Then found this thread.

I only did a few things, 1) Turned off Time Machine. 2) Using the built in Disk Utility, reformatted the external drive to FAT, then reformatted again to two partitions with the first one being FAT and the 2nd one MAC OS extended (journaled). Not sure if this step was necessary or not, but one other person said to do this so I did. Reformatted the external drive 1 final time to MAC OS extended (journalled) no partitions, just one big 1TB drive. 3) Found the spotlight software in system preferences, clicked the privacy tab and excluded the 1TB external Fantom Drive from being searched by Spotlight. I don't have any virus software running. I think step #3 was the only thing I really needed to do, but I did the other reformatting steps just in case.

Started TM again, at first it was processing super fast, maybe half a GB per minute, then after 2GB it slowed down to about 10GB per hour. Which was still 250% faster than before. When I went to sleep last night I had 250GB left to backup and figured it would take 24 more hours, but when I checked this morning, I has happy to see that Time Machine had completed almost all of the 250GB overnight in under 9 hours at about 30GB/hr which is 600% faster than before! Only 5GB remained but it took 30 minutes to finish the last 5GB (back to 10GB per hour).

Not sure why TM was fast overnight, maybe some process sleeps after awhile and allows TM to speed up at night? So I'm happy now with my TM backup. :D
 
Just found this tread, I tried to restore my back up using the migration on the utility menu and was getting 35hours to restore. I then did a reinstall of the os , turned off spotlight and now I am getting 2.5 mb/sec though put compared to the 4mb/sec. But now the install is down to 2.5 hours for 234GB.
 
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