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Ssssssllllloooowww Time Machine in Lion

I was backing up to a drive that e had a Windows partition . It appeared to take 10 (ten) hours to index the Win partition, but why when I was backing up Mac?

Maybe it will be quicker next time!
 
Slow Time Machine on Lion

Mine has been fine ever since I had the patience of a saint and it ran the initial backup after upgrading... but it took a VERY long time.

Why hasn't MacRumors picked up on this issue yet and reported it? Is it isolated?
 
OMG!

I have been running Lion, on my:

13-inch, Mid 2009 MacBook Pro
2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB


since the day of release.

Suddenly Time Machine has started to run at a snails pace! It has been stuck on "Preparing Backup" for over 1 hour!

Up until yesterday this only took a few mins. and, in SL, it was always very quick.

I have to say, I am not happy at all with Lion so far. I hope 10.7.1 will fix this.
 
You might want to try forcing a deep traversal.

Easiest way I've found is to boot from a Snow Leopard DVD and then restart your Mac. Since you've booted from a different O/S install(the DVD) this tells Time Machine that files on the drive might have changed. Thus, forcing a deep traversal.
 
You might want to try forcing a deep traversal.

Easiest way I've found is to boot from a Snow Leopard DVD and then restart your Mac. Since you've booted from a different O/S install(the DVD) this tells Time Machine that files on the drive might have changed. Thus, forcing a deep traversal.

Thanks for the tip!

I gave this a try. Actually I booted Snow Leopard from an external USB drive and then restarted Lion. It seems to have helped a little, but Time Machine is still much slower in Lion.
 
Good to hear the deep traversal trick worked a little.

How long and how much data is causing the sloooowness?

When I backup 30GB of data TM(my TM drive is FW) is taking under 3 minutes. If I run a backup immediately after a backup like that the time goes to around 13-20 seconds.

When my TM is a little hosed the 13-20 second time jumps to over 2 minutes. For me, the deep traversal puts the expect times back to where they should be.
 
My full backups are around 152GB and in Lion it now takes hours to complete.

Lion seems to want to do very large backups even if there are only small changes to my data.
 
My full backups are around 152GB and in Lion it now takes hours to complete.

Lion seems to want to do very large backups even if there are only small changes to my data.

Wow was about to do Time Machine today, may not be worth it if I have to wait that long.

Quick question about Time Machine in general, if I set it up, when I restore something onto another Mac, can I choose the specific files I want to move over, or is it always a full restore. For example, I want to restore only 2 movies instead of my whole collection.
 
Hi stevenpa,

I'm no expert on Time Machine. My best guess is that, yes, what you want to do is possible. It is just a guess though.

No doubt someone with more knowledge will be along soon to answer your question.
 
I have figured out by now that I don't have this problem only on the Time Machine volume but also on my system volume alot.

At least once per day my Mac forgets the entire Index for / and has to reindex it - just like it happens all the time on my Time Machine Volume.

I found out that sometimes after waking from sleep the mds daemon is stuck and doesn't work anymore. It seems to get killed and restarted eventually. Once that happens either the Time Machine or the / Index are marked as corrupt and will be completely replaced.

This in take turns 50 Minutes on my Mac and 7 hours on my Time Machine Volume.

I think the whole issue is that mds doesn't reliably 'wake from sleep'.
 
I have figured out by now that I don't have this problem only on the Time Machine volume but also on my system volume alot.

At least once per day my Mac forgets the entire Index for / and has to reindex it - just like it happens all the time on my Time Machine Volume.

I found out that sometimes after waking from sleep the mds daemon is stuck and doesn't work anymore. It seems to get killed and restarted eventually. Once that happens either the Time Machine or the / Index are marked as corrupt and will be completely replaced.

This in take turns 50 Minutes on my Mac and 7 hours on my Time Machine Volume.

I think the whole issue is that mds doesn't reliably 'wake from sleep'.

My MBA 2011 was "preparing to backup" for a long time. Former TM backups (to my usb drive) went fine. After stopping the backup and reboot the MBA it was backing up fine.
 
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