Comments on: Time Machine and Slow First Backup

By: Matthias

Matthias — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:01:40 +0000

Thank you so much

I just disabled Spotlight for my 2TB external hard drive and now timemachine is much faster with the first backup.
Now I’m much more relaxed with my new hard drive.

Thanks again

By: Tim

Tim — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 17:27:09 +0000

Following on from seeing the responses about the operations performed on file handles, i cleared the safari cache. Once I did this my Time Machine backup completed quickly. Prior to this I had 15Gb to go of 50Gb. Once I cleared the cache it completed pretty quickly.

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 11:25:01 +0000

This is a great page with great comments.
This entry, alongside; http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html – has allowed me to (touch-wood), troubleshoot my own problem.
It is still backing up as we speak, but I have got past the hanging phase (as suggested by Het9), by excluding all system components from the backup.
I also deindexed my TimeCapsule from Spotlight and Sophos Anti-virus scans.

I had to repair my Internal MacBook HD, using the original Apple install disc initially, which would explain the possible link to one or more corrupt files in the System.

Thanks to all for your suggestions.

By: camhunt

camhunt — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 22:41:20 +0000

cool, starting my first backup, will format using disk utility, thanks Steve

By: Markus

Markus — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 21:41:54 +0000

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!

By: MattConnolly

MattConnolly — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:13:26 +0000

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.

By: CrackHead

CrackHead — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 15:37:19 +0000

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!

By: Kyle

Kyle — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:40:12 +0000

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?

By: Brady

Brady — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 02:17:39 +0000

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!

By: Henry

Henry — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:49:34 +0000

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/