Cannot finish the backup before my journey begins. Since ist started two days back, it is now at 35%. What a ..
This happens on my MacBook Pro with current macOS Sequoia 15.5.
I've been trying with two different external USB hard drives, including a brand new one.
Come on, Apple.
[Edited by Moderator]
Original Title: Time Machine backup takes days!!!
MacBook Pro 16″
dvo777 wrote:
Update:
Yesterday I freed some space on my systen, which now 25 GB for free SSD space and 5 GB of free RAM.
You said you has 512 GB SSD. So now you have 5% free space on the SSD. That's far below the recommended 15%-20% so you will continue to see slowdown and problems. Also, Time Machine uses some space on your internal SSD as a "staging ground" for some of its processes; it isn't just straight out copying files (which requires little free space), it is setting things up so you can recover files from Time Machine from different dates so it is more complicated than just copying files.
There may be more than one thing wrong here, but it will be impossible to troubleshoot the Time Machine slowness until you have about 15%-20% free space, which is most accurately gauged by open Disk Utility and examining your internal drive.
dvo777 wrote:
Update:
Yesterday I freed some space on my systen, which now 25 GB for free SSD space and 5 GB of free RAM.
You said you has 512 GB SSD. So now you have 5% free space on the SSD. That's far below the recommended 15%-20% so you will continue to see slowdown and problems. Also, Time Machine uses some space on your internal SSD as a "staging ground" for some of its processes; it isn't just straight out copying files (which requires little free space), it is setting things up so you can recover files from Time Machine from different dates so it is more complicated than just copying files.
There may be more than one thing wrong here, but it will be impossible to troubleshoot the Time Machine slowness until you have about 15%-20% free space, which is most accurately gauged by open Disk Utility and examining your internal drive.
dvo777 wrote:
How would your boss react if, for a clearly defined task you started to do, each time he asks you how much time you still need to complete it, you keep increasing the estimate?
Well, if the boss provided me with an office that is 1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter in volume, I might tell the boss that if I had some more working space, I might be able to project completion of the task better. With only 5% free space, it is very hard for your computer to perform tasks efficiently (or predict how long they will take).
There may be other things causing slowdowns. For instance, my work computer has employer mandated anti-virus and "big Fix" remote management, and its Time Machine backups can take tens of minutes sometimes while my personal Mac does incremental updates in a minute or less usually.
For the very first backup, to an external SSD, 400 GB took about about 15 minutes to an external SSD. I also use a mechanical external for a second backup, that took about 1 hour. The SuperDuper "clone" type backup (makes a "clone" much like Carbon Copy Cloner CCC -- bombich.com) took about the same amount of time as the Time Machine backup, both for the full initial one and for incremental follow up ones.
Owl-53 had a great suggestion: use a "clone" backup utility instead of Time Machine if the Time Machine method is not to your liking. If you go with the clone, I would use 2 or 3 such clones and stagger them, so you have older versions of files should you end up backing up a corrupted file and want to recover an earlier uncorrupted version. I don't think CCC or SuperDuper will slow down much even if your internal drive is close to full.
To see if something else is slowing down the backups, you could download and run the free Etrecheck and post its report here; give it access to all files and folders when it asks.
Using EtreCheck - Apple Community
8 GB of free space is totally too little. You could easily get to a state where the machine could freeze up and not reboot.
I try to keep a minimum of 80-100 GB of free space on my boot drive to facilitate optimal system and application performance.
Say what you may but that's the real world we're living in. Also 8 GB probably is not enough to create a local snapshot which is part of the TM backup scheme. You can try to free up some space by launching Disk Utility, making sure all Volumes are being displayed and see how many local snapshots are on your boot drive. You can delete all but the latest:
Give that a try one see if it helps.
Trying out an alternative backup solution for comparison is good.
I had already done so, in order to get at least some full backup in reasonable time.
I've simply used `rsync -ax`. It works about 4-5 times faster than Time Machine.
Have you used Disk Utility’s First Aid on all the drives yet?
It’s generally accepted good practice for computing, to keep at least 15% to 20% of the total drive capacity as empty to avoid unintended consequences such that which is currently occurring
Translated to @ 15% >> 76.8 GB of empty space and up to 20% >> 102.4 GB, On the Internal Drive of the computer
This type of issue, often occurs if the Time Machine Drive isn’t attached to the computer and TM Backup is set to run on a schedule.
TM Backup makes snapshots on the internal drive until the Time Machine Drive is attached. Then, the snapshots are transferred to the external drive.
How to delete Time Machine snapshots on your Mac.
As per supplied info, this computer has about 1.56 % of Empty Space on the computer
dvo777 wrote:
Goodness, needs 30+ GB free local disk space for organizing the backp? What an extremely inefficient design,
in particular when no delta to an existing backup needs to be taken into account!
Any even if so, why does the wonderful TM backup procedure not warn the user about this??
I'm not sure what experience you have with using other computers, but modern Windows and Linux systems also need to keep 15%-20% free space on the boot drive to avoid significant slowdowns and performance issues. Also, SSDs lifetime is decreased notably when run with such small amounts of free space (you originally reported less than 2% free, now you indicate less than 10% which is still inadequate). It's not just Time Machine, it's the general running of the OS as well.
If you believe Time Machine BAckup utility is broken or not to ones' liking
Set it aside
Use a Third Party Software that can do about the same thing and more
Whether this will work under the current condition visa vie very limited Empty Space on the internal drive
It could be a good indicator where the problem may actually be
https://support.bombich.com/hc/en-us/articles/20686449773847-How-to-schedule-a-backup
Note: Yes I use this software to augment what Time Machine BAckup has been doing from about the time TM Backup was first introduced back in OS X 10.5 Leopard
I meanwhile noticed very bad behavior when copying files, at least from HFS+ to APFS, which can explain part of the wrong estimations of remaining backup time by TM:
If the source file is very large, while reading or writing the file, it appears to grow indefinitely!
I experienced this with a 3.5 GB file and a 105 GB file.
This happens also when using sync, cp, or mv.
This must be due to a bug in at least one of the mentioned Apple file systems.
8 GB free is not enough, but really, you need, 30GB MINIMUM free space.
Update:
Yesterday I freed some space on my systen, which now 25 GB for free SSD space and 5 GB of free RAM.
I had to retry the backup after my external target disk had to be disconnected (I'm meanwhile travelling).
Still the backup process takes WAY TOO LONG.
Its initial estimation for remaining hours was 2 hours, which would have been perfectly okay.
Yet it quickly started increasing - after about an hour it said 6 hours.
Now, some 6 hours later, where it claims to have reached 50%, it tells me 8 hours.
How much free space on you drives?
How much free ram do you have?
My system currently appears to have 2 GB of free RAM and 512 GB of SSD.
The destination has 1 TB of capacity, so way more than enough.
If the free RAM and disk space becomes too low for efficient backup, there should be at least a warning
As I wrote, my machine has 512 GB of SSD space. It currently has some 8 GB free.
As mentioned, the target drive/partition has 1 TB, and it is brand new,
with the partition being empty when starting the TM backup two days ago.
So no excuse bad performance - the backup process should straightforwardly dump all SSD contents.
Goodness, needs 30+ GB free local disk space for organizing the backp? What an extremely inefficient design,
in particular when no delta to an existing backup needs to be taken into account!
Any even if so, why does the wonderful TM backup procedure not warn the user about this??
Unable to finish Time Machine back up on macOS Sequoia
