Time Machine Slow backup...

Just started TM backups on a new 1TB drive today....

It did 30GB in 2 & half hours! A little slow...

Why does it go soooo slow? Supposed to be faster in SL.... don't think so....

Went for Carbon Copy Cloner..... much better.... currently 27GB in 23 mins.... thats more like it.

That'll be my weekend moan out of the way I guess...

 

Well it would go even faster if you were to use fire wire. USB is theoretically maxed out at 480 mb/s, but it doesn't even reach those speeds. Firewire 800 can reach around 800 mb/s, and while that is also a theoretical number, it is much faster than USB 2.0.

 

That does seem to be pretty pokey unless your Mac is new also and doing its first Spotlight indexing at the same time as the TM backup.

The big advantage of TM - I doubt I'm telling you anything you don't already know - is that once you have a full backup everything else is incremental and handled in the background. CCC is a great program, I've used it for years, but it doesn't offer that "I need the version of the document I deleted 3 days ago back again" ease of use and functionality of Time Machine. But on your 1TB drive you have lots of room for BOTH, and that's the way I'd do it.

 

2 and half hours seems out of whack. My initial one took just over 30 mins (through USB also) and I even had almost 30GB in just photos, let alone all the other stuff. So yeah, something sounds like it's messing up your TM. Are incremental backups really slow too?

 

Thanks for the responses. Usually through USB you can prob get 1GB a min or a little more if your files are huge. I wasn't getting no-where near this speed as it was taking 45 mins to do 8GB, which is a bit crappy.

Anyhow, CCC did a full clone in 5 hours (380GB). Even though thats still a long time, it worked ok. On CCC now I can tell it to update the cloned image when I plug the drive in so that it will update it with the current items on my internal drive and therefore will keep a bootable, up to date copy of all my files on an external HDD.

I know this solution doesn't work for incrementals, TM was good in that respect, but it is quicker, it doesn't crash like TM and its bootable too. I may split the 2TB drive to 2 and run TM also, but I'm not sure if it would work as I have a lot of data; but most of which doesn't change.

 

One thing i would recommend is just to cycle the drive in Time Machine. Basically in Time machine preferences just go ahead and select 'None' as the backup volume and tell time machine to stop backing up. Then go ahead and re-select the HD as the backup. I have seen this work many times in the past. I can't see the actual Sparse-Bundle causing the problem however so another suggestion would be to pull the Timemachine.plist file. Restart then try again. Oh and Spotlight could be indexing as well.