Time Machine and Slow First Backup
So after my woes getting Leopard I started playing with one of it’s best features on the weekend, Time Machine.
Time Machine is an example of what’s so good about Mac OS X: A beautiful UI on top of some serious software. The initial experience is about as good as it can be:
Plug in external USB drive. The system notices, asks if you want to use this drive for Time Machine Backups? When you say yes, it asks you if it’s OK to erase what’s on the drive if it’s not formatted HFS+ (the Mac native file system). Say yes to this, and you’re done. A backup is scheduled for a short time later.
However, some people have been reporting that this first backup is taking a very long time, and I was one of them. My PowerBook has a 60 gig drive in it, and after 2 solid days of backing up, I started to get suspicious.
Digging around the Apple forums, I found a few people who said that letting Time Machine format the drive was the problem, so I stopped the backup, formatted the drive myself using Disk Utility, and then started a new backup. This one went very quickly, completing the backup in a few hours.
During the slow backup I had a look at file system activity using fs_usage (a very handy tool), and noticed that the Finder process was constantly making getattrlist calls on files all over the Time Machine backup disks during the backup; during my successful backup this wasn’t happening.
Someone had also suggested that the problem was that Spotlight was indexing the backup drive during the backup, but before formatting the backup drive, I tried adding it to the Spotlight exclusions and kicking off a backup, and that didn’t help. The problem seems to be something related to how Time Machine prepares the disk.
Anyway, now that my initial backups are done, incremental backups are quick and I get to play with the funky Time Machine starfield UI that makes me want to trash files just so I can go get them from my backups.
November 5th, 2007 at 12:23 am
Interesting alternative to time machine:
http://www.crashplan.com/features/timeMachine.vtl
It’s cross platform, and has many more features while remaining quite easy to use.
November 15th, 2007 at 12:11 am
I had originally partitioned my 1 TB (10^12 bytes ~= 931 MB?) drive and over about 4 days got all of 14 GB across. After watching 100 GB go across manually in 2 hours into the other partition I started looking for info on Google, and came across your web site. Stopped the backup – at dock and on preferences page. Then I erased the drive and turned on the backups (prefs and dock) and it is going much faster. First GB in 5 minutes.
fs_usage still shows a lot of getattrlist entries but it zips past much faster than before.
Cheers
November 19th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Any suggestions for the dreaded time machine stall on initial backup? Progress just stops at exactly 17.01gb every time – despite a dozen attempts to repartition my drive and start again. I am using the correct partitioning scheme and have no spaces, non-alphanumeric characters in the drive/volume names. I am desperate and any suggestions would be appreciated.
November 24th, 2007 at 12:26 am
@Het9
I had the same problem: Time Machine stalling at weird locations (amount of MB or KB). I found a fix for it after experimenting. Again, Backing up + Spotlight Indexing combination is the culprit for the stall (probably because spotlight index and changes it’s index file constantly while indexing while Time Machine is backing it up (which causes Time Machine to keep backing up the same file, and because you don’t have the Time Machine backup drive from not being indexed, it goes into a doom loop).
Anyway here is the fix for the initial Time Machine backup.
1) Turn off Time Machine.
2) Clean all Time Machine backup files from the external hard drive being used for backups. (if you have any)
3) Add the Time Machine external hard drive to the list of drives NOT to be indexed for Spotlight.
4) Restart your machine (this will skip more steps that i have to write).
5) After machine restarts, check spotlight (Command + Space) and see if it is indexing. If it is, leave it alone until it finishes indexing any drives left.
…later..
6) After Spotlight has finished, turn Time Machine back on.
7) On the Time Machine icon on the dock, right click it and select ‘Back Up Now’. It should work.
Hope this helps (took me hours to figure out)
November 25th, 2007 at 11:12 am
I am using an external HD for my backups (Maxtor OneTouch4, USB). Even though I formatted it as HFS+ using disk utility, when I rechecked it showed it to be FAT formatted. To format as HFS+ definitively, I followed these steps (as described in the link below):
1) open disk utility
2) select the “partition” tab
3) choose one partition from the pulldown
4) click on “options”
5) Click on “GUID”
6) Once that finishes, select the “erase” tab. You’ll see it’s now no longer FAT type. You can erase, for good measure.
Things are zipping along nicely now.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/apple/leopard-disk-utility-format-issue-screws-with-time-machine-but-theres-an-easy-fix-316573.php
December 1st, 2007 at 1:48 pm
@ Anthony
I appreciate the advice. I tried that and it didn’t work. What did work was excluding my System and System Applications from backup. Everything else backs up fine, but if I try to include the System it just stalls again halfway through backing up the System. I assume something is corrupt in the System that is causing that problem. Strangely, I haven’t been able to get disk utility to check the permissions ever since I upgraded to Leopard. Anyone have any thoughts on what the culprit system files could be?
December 4th, 2007 at 7:39 am
Turn off your anti virus and it speeds up your Time Machine
December 21st, 2007 at 3:21 am
Turning off Norton AntiVirus sped it up noticeably– thanks!
January 14th, 2008 at 4:31 am
Instead of turning Norton AntiVirus off, I specified the timemachine drive as a drive not to scan.
I did this half way through the first timemachine backup and immediately the backup speed increased significantly.
January 15th, 2008 at 1:23 am
Good call with the spotlight fix. Worked immediately. I actually did this while backup was in progress and the speed jumped dramatically.
Thanks.
January 15th, 2008 at 1:25 am
Never mind… responded to the wrong forum. Pardon the interruption.
January 17th, 2008 at 6:35 am
I did the Spotlight fix also and my 120 GB MacBook Pro backed up overnight to a Firelite 160.
February 9th, 2008 at 5:47 am
I just stopped my virusscan (Sophos) from on access scanning and backup speeded up immediately.
March 12th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.
I just received a 1 TB Iomega drive ostensibly pre-formatted for Mac (HFS+)
After 7 hours it had transfered about 14 GB. What!?!?
I looked around and found your blog.
Stopped the backup, reformatted the drive and restarted Time Machine.
As I type this it is already at 3 GB after a few minutes.
Thanks. You’ve saved some unnecessary wear and tear on the new drive…. and my nerves.
Cheers,
Alan.
March 21st, 2008 at 10:42 am
Hi,
After leaving my 750 Gb hard drive for overnight, it backed up only 5 Gb. I found it annoying as I was writing a paper for publication and I needed my Mac Book Pro badly at work. Luckily I found your website and it helped me a lot to erase the disk myself and then take the backup.
Thank you very much!!
Sai
April 29th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
[...] you aren’t using a Time Capsule, don’t let Time Machine format the disk, do it yourself (not relevant if you have Time Capsule since these [...]
May 18th, 2008 at 8:22 am
TURN OFF ANTIVIRUS!!!!
oh man it slows it down so much…
I’m on a university network and we’re required to have antivirus, but it’s not like i need it anyway!
I wish I found that out about 8 hours ago!
May 20th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Spotlight slowed my backup a bit as well. I made an exclusion while the drive was backing up and its already copied over 2 gb in the matter of a few minutes. Im on a Macbook CoreDuo running 10.5.2
I hope this little bit of info helps a well
June 9th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
I formatted my disk 4 times (HFS Journaled), and it is still super slow! At two gigs an hour it is going to take over 8 days!!! This sucks. I have 10.5.3 on PowerPC dual pro.
June 14th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
OMG I am dying here. I have a 160G Powerbook G4 and a 60G MacBook and it is taking forever. I am using a time capsule so I guess it will take a week. Sad, very sad.
August 13th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Anthony Persaud, thanks your tip fixed my slow back up!!!! Thanks a bunch. Should mention I noticed the Finder was hogging CPU cycles b4 the startup
August 16th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Same thing. Disabled Intego Antivirus and backup speed increased dramatically. 288 gigs in about 12 hours, which is about double what it was before…. and I’m not getting the “cannot complete backup” about 70% through the backup anymore.
So, i think antivirus does something not only to speed but prevents successful completion at times (at least the first backup anyway).
December 4th, 2008 at 10:39 am
At long last, the solution of my glacial backup speed!
Your suggestion about changing Spotlight to exclude indexing the backup seemed like the easiest place to start. And as soon as i excluded it, the speed went from 2 bytes a second to… oh wow its done. I had 6GB to go! And it just finished in the 2 minutes after changing the setting. Nice!!! Thank you! I’m bumping you up on Google search results.
January 11th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
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.
March 21st, 2009 at 2:22 am
I have tried everything:
1) I have no anti virus.
2) I have disabled spotlight on the backup drive.
3) I used disk utility to partition the drive.
4) Back up drive is Mac OS X extended journaled and has plenty of space.
and initial back up is slower than continental drift.
What am I missing?
March 21st, 2009 at 3:40 am
OK I found the problem.
I have never installed anti virus software on my laptop.
I did however transfer files onto my laptop from an older laptop that had previously had Norton anti virus installed and then uninstalled.
A hidden Norton script that had not been removed from the old laptop when Norton was uninstalled, ended up on my new laptop and was surreptitiously scanning every file that Time Machine was trying to back up!
I used
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/num.nsf/docid/2002110814042611
to remove all the hidden Norton files on my new laptop.
Now, … finally … Time Machine is humming along. I just hope my external drive isn’t fried after a week of incessant reading and writing!
June 15th, 2009 at 12:46 am
Let me be very precise about my back up process… maybe this will help someone.
I have a 640 GB external HD which I have 2 partitions (500 for TM, and 140 for files). I formatted the drive with the 140 partition FIRST, TM SECOND, and then connected via FireWire 800 for my first back up.
I only had 104 GB to backup. After backing up about 200 MB at a quick speed, it slowed down to ~400KB/s. This couldn’t be real.
Things I did before successfully backing up. I followed the advice to exclude the drive from Spotlight Indexing. The second thing I did was to REFORMAT with the TM partition FIRST. That may or may not have been the trick for me.
Now I am backing up with the USB port instead of Fire800, and I’ve gotten 2 GB backed in minutes. Activity Monitor is showing writing speeds from 75 KB/s to 23 MB/s. Looks a lot better. I’m going to try switching back to FireWire800 to see if I can milk some more speed.
June 15th, 2009 at 12:49 am
ONE MORE THING. Stop your anti-virus scanner. I just stopped Sophos and I’m getting great consistency at 16 MB/s. Also, I can hear my MBP fan whirring louder and louder, which suggest more read/write processes are occurring per second.
This site helped. http://www.tongfamily.com/archives/2008/04/time-machine-slow-initial-backup/
September 13th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
WOW. cant thank you enough! i have searched for ages to find out why it was so slow!! after about 2 hours i had backed up ONLY 2 mb!! now its doing about 20 mb a second! thank you soo much for this! saving me alot of frustration!
September 18th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
My Time Machine is backing up to a Trekstor 200gb drive at a rate of 1GB each 40 seconds!
That’s pretty fast for USB 2 isn’t it?
Or should it be even faster?
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:37 am
Norton Anti-Virus on a mac? are you dudes speeding on crack? Norton Anti-Virus is COMPLETELY unnecessary. Symantec is a con-company. Uninstall that load of horse dropping immediately, dudes! Come on!
November 8th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Finder accessing the disk is consistent with problems I had – after 18 hours, only 60GB had been backed up.
I simply opened Activity Monitor and quit the Finder whilst Time Machine was doing its initial backup. The backup speed went from under 2MB/sec to over 30MB/sec in my case, The remaining 120GB backed up in about 2 hours.
January 2nd, 2010 at 4:41 pm
what MattConnolly said actually helped. I started doing a backup of almost 500GB from mid 2009 MBP to a Drobo Pro. After roughly 35GB the disc activity for written data dropped from roughly 40MB/s to blow 1MB/s. I noticed a finder process having around 45% CPU activity. So I quit that process, which also closed the small TimeMachine progress window. But TimeMachine continues to backup (at the fast rate again) which I can check via the TimeMachine icon.
Thanks for the tip!