Time Machine backing up way too many files

A little while ago I noticed Time Machine was taking forever to perform its hourly backups on my work computer (MacBook Pro, 10.6.8). I downloaded TimeTracker and Time Machine Buddy, and compared TM's performance between my work and home Macs. Let me lay out my observations and the problem for you:
- Regular backups routinely take 20-30 minutes on the work computer; sometimes longer; they usually take about 1 minute at home.
- My wife works at home so both Macs are used about the same amount during the day.
- According to TimeTracker, these normal backups basically have the same makeup on both Macs. Around 40-60 MBs of data, and the biggest single file tends to be something in a web browser "Application Support" folder, e.g. Firefox's places.sqlite file at 40 megs.
- When I noticed this, I even excluded that browser file from TM. Didn't have an effect.
- The biggest difference between the two Macs that I can glean from Time Machine Buddy is the sheer number of files being prepared and copied. At home, it's a few thousand, maybe 3-4. At work, more like 100,000. In fact, all of my overnight backups were identical: 60,744 files copied (14 KB) followed by 28,176 files copied (9 KB). So, it's clearly not linked to the size (data-wise) of the backup. (Again, this was less data after I excluded that FF folder. I've since re-instated it.)
- I don't see anything in the TM Buddy log about a "deep traversal."
- Can't imagine it's an external HDD issue since (I assume) all the TM preparations should be happening on the Mac side, but for what it's worth, this started with one drive (USB 2.0) that I then restored to a larger partition of another drive (FW 800), and the issue persists.
I've seen lots of other threads about endless TM backups and regularly copying mountains of data, but hadn't come across anything that seemed to match my peculiar situation.
Thanks for your help!

GFIVE wrote:
Same problem here!
There is a new "me too" feature in Apple Support Communities. Check the bottom of the initial post:
I will however upgrade to Lion in a few days. I'm hoping this will fix this annoying problem.
Be very, very careful with that strategy. Installing an operating system update to a system already exhibiting flakiness is usually a bad idea.
I suggest a good backup using a cloning tool such as Carbon Copy Cloner. Time Machine is best for backups, but if you know you are going to need a backup, a clone is a good thing to have.
Once you have that backup, erase your hard drive, install Lion, reinstall the latest version of your applications, and then migrate over only your documents.

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Time machine backups take way too long

Greetings,
Having trouble with Time Machine backups taking way too long. (No, it's not the first backup after some momentous event, as 90% of what I read about slow backups mentions; it's _every_ backup.)
20" iMac purchased Oct 2008. OS 10.6.8. 500 GB internal hard drive. 3 TB external backup drive. Was tested at the local "Genius" Bar, but they found nothing wrong with it. The best they could do is to recommend a restore from Time Machine, and if that didn't work, start clean and reload the OS and then copy my stuff back. I don't think so. I actually did a full Time Machine restore for a different reason, and it didn't help (except that I gained a few GB of disk space!).
My Time Machine backups now take about 39 minutes to complete. I have a 500 GB internal drive and this problem happens regardless of which external drive I use. (I have 3: 2 WD hard drives and one [noisy!] G-drive.) My current backup drive is a 3 TB WD drive with 2 TB of free space.
These are small incremental backups, typically about 35 MB. It doesn't take half an hour to copy 35 MB!
All phases take a long time, but the most irritating one is where TM appears to get stuck for a long time at the beginning and end of the copying phase. For example, at one point it will say something along the lines of Backing Up 7 KB of 34.4 MB. And it'll be like that for minutes on end. Later it will say something like 35 MB of 35 MB and hang there for minutes on end. During these periods the write I/O rate will go up and down, and CPU usage will often be very high (with backupd using 90 - 100%, in addition to highly elevated System CPU usage). In one particular backup the I/O write rate for one part of it looked like a heartbeat on an EKG! I should have taken a screenshot.
At the beginning during the Calculating Changes phase, backupd is using between 90 and 100% CPU.
There is also high CPU usage during the next phase, Preparing. And the number of items being prepared is in the thousands.
It always goes in two rounds because it finds that the root directory (/) has been modified.
I've Googled and searched Mac forums and found nothing useful. I started with a new .plist file and nothing's changed.
Can anyone help? Thanks!
I wrote the above Jun 28. Yeah, finally getting around to posting it. Since then it's gotten worse. I now do a manual backup once a day and it takes almost an hour. I tried re-indexing Spotlight. No good.
Can anyone help? Again, this is not a "first backup." It is _every_ backup.
Thanks!
AEF

Thanks for your efforts. Here are my answers, comments, and further info:
I believe I have repaired permissions on my drive as part of my troubleshooting. And I'm sure I checked SMART status, which came up with a thumbs up, so to speak. I'm trying again. I don't see any useful messages in any logs on the console. I'm looking at "All Messages" and there is so far nothing useful. Oh, I think you must mean repair as in "Repair Disk," not "Repair Disk Permissions." I believe the "genius" at the Apple store did that or something just as good. The machine checked out fine according to them.
Checked SMART status just now: passed. Ran Quick Drive Test: also passed.
Oh, I installed "Time Machine Buddy". Occasionally, and only occasionally, I get a "deep traversal needed message" like this (I copied this from .Backup.log):
Running preflight for "Macintosh HD" (mount: '/' fsUUID: BF606E9A-5FD0-3B92-8D76-33DC63E7B2B1 eventDBUUID: 30DD929D-8982-46C2-BAE6-F0BD1E73916A)
        Scanning nodes needing deep traversal
        Node requires deep traversal: /Users/alanfeldman/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Database/apdb reason:contains changes|must scan subdirs|fsevent|missed reservation|
        Calculating size of changes
        Should copy 2919 items (27.8 MB) representing 7116 blocks of size 4096. 546805181 blocks available.
Preflight complete for "Macintosh HD" (mount: '/' fsUUID: BF606E9A-5FD0-3B92-8D76-33DC63E7B2B1 eventDBUUID: 30DD929D-8982-46C2-BAE6-F0BD1E73916A)
Time elapsed: 1 minute, 39.000 seconds
But the vast majority of the time I do NOT get this message. But if there's something wrong with this apdb file, what can I do to fix it?
Note that there is usually, if not always, a lot of CPU activity or I/O (disk) activity, but not a lot getting done.

Time Machine Back up is too slow

I just bought a WD 1 TB hard drive for my Macbook Pro. I put files on but for some reason the Time Machine's first back up is taking forever for only 54 gbs. Is this normal? It took me just a few minutes to put in the 25 gb of itunes data on it but the Time Machine back up is so slow. Plus the encryption is very slow too.

Hi there Balhabib,
I would recommend taking a look at the troubleshooting steps found in the article below.
Time Machine: Troubleshooting backup issues
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3275
-Griff W.

Time Machine back-up disk too small

Recently I had to restore my system from a Time Machine back-up, all seemed to work fine. Now I have a situation where time machine gives me an error when I attempt a back up, saying there's not enough free space on the back-up drive. The drive I'm backing up is max 500megs, the external BU drive is a TB. I fixed all the prefs but it seems as though Time machine is not deleting old files from my BU drive to make room for new ones. Any ideas?

OrangePanda wrote:
Hi, I have the same problem.
My backup drive (G-Tech Q 500Gb) has 465Gb of space and my Pro has only 434Gb,
Your backup drive is much too small. To work well (and keep a reasonable number of backups for you), TM usually needs roughly 2-3 times the space of the data it's backing-up. See item #1 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip* at the top of this forum.
yet when I tried to update it says I still need 63Gb of space??? I downloaded the Time Machine buddy recommended here, the message said that some old copies were deleted but still need 64Gb, only had 40Gb.
Did I miss something? should I just wipe my G-Tech and try again?
Short-term, probably. Without the actual messages, we can only speculate, but most likely you've made a lot of changes or for some other reason TM is trying to back-up about 54 gb (the 64 includes about 20% extra for workspace). Copy and post the TM Buddy messages here and we can be sure.
Long-term, you need a bigger drive.

Time Machine Back-up Taking Too much Space

I have only been a Mac owner for a little over three months.
I set up Time Machine with an external hard drive three months ago. My Mac hard drive has used 64.16 GB of space out of 249 GB. Ny external drive (300 GB) however was full and deleting on its own in just 10 weeks. Three days ago I erased everything on the external drive and started over. After the first full back up, 50.61 GB of space was taken. Now three days later it is up to 102.54 GB. What am I doing wrong, or what do I need to do to correct.
This is a 'home use only' computer and daily changes are minimal.
Thanks for any feedback.
Roger

Hi mahlquist,
I have exactly the same problem on three macs running SL. Sometimes it simply wants to backup the whole drive instead of creating an incremental backup. The worst thing is that it deletes old backups first (when there is not enough space for an additional complete backup) without asking you if you want it to do that. So, the best solution is to deactivate the automatic backup in TM and start it manually only. Watch at the TM window, see what it is doing when the backup starts. When it starts to delete old backups, cancel the backup, restart your Mac and then try again. In most cases, TM then works again and creates incremental backups. Another bug is that sometimes it backups even folders that are in the list of excluded folders. I didn't manage to break TM of doing that. So I decided for a reinstall of SL on the machine that was affected.
This is one of the most annoying bugs in SL. TM is nearly unusable in SL. I also tried a complete wipe and install of SL to make sure that it wasn't the upgrade from Leopard that causes the broken TM. But this didn't solve the problem. In general, there are lots of bugs in SL. In the meantime, I would say that SL is one of the most annoying versions of OS X that Apple has ever released. Lots of bugs in such a manner are really new to me as a Mac user for many years.

Why does time machine back up when no new files have been added?

I run time machine manually and even after having just back up, it says it is backing up 50mb of something. Nothing has been added or taken away. It just keeps adding and using up disk space.

System files are constantly changing, TM backs the whole machine up not just the files you are working on,
And 55mb is small change

Time machine back up taking too long

Why is time machine taking so long to back up? I just downladed the update and it's still dragging

You are entitled to 90 day telephone support from Apple. Try contacting them.
Apple Support Contact
Apple Support contact - Telephone

"Come Back Soon" Way Too Many Times

It seems discussions is going down every day. Anyone else having any issues?

I had this today when I first Logged in.
For me, in Firefox, just restarting the Browser sorted it.
Edit.
Maybe some of this info will help
Full size here https://skitch.com/ralphjohns/ruj2a/picture-1
9:05 PM Sunday; March 6, 2011
Message was edited by: Ralph Johns (UK)

Time Machine Backs Up Same Number Of Files Every Time It Runs

Thought I had TM sorted out on my new iMac (Snow Leopard), but it keeps exhibiting this behavior and I can't get it to stop. It backs up to an external HDD with plenty of space via FW800, connections are all good etc. I've run Disk Warrior on the boot disk, the TM disk and one other external drive that is included in the backup. TM HDD and the other one are both excluded from Spotlight & I've forced a re-index of the main HDD several times as well.
The odd/persistent behavior is that TM backs up pretty much the exact same number of files from the other external HDD every hour. It's always the same whether the machine is idle or in use. Hoping the Great Pondini might be able to tell me why this might be happening or what I can do about it...

Here's the report:
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/Backadoodle/Backups.backupdb
No pre-backup thinning needed: 4.48 GB requested (including padding), 652.13 GB available
Copied 4310 files (436.3 MB) from volume Big Music.
Waiting for index to be ready (100)
Copied 9372 files (3.7 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 3.90 GB requested (including padding), 648.42 GB available
Copied 4310 files (0 bytes) from volume Big Music.
Waiting for index to be ready (100)
Copied 9372 files (3.2 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Starting post-backup thinning
Deleted backup /Volumes/Backadoodle/Backups.backupdb/Kitch/2012-01-07-091200: 651.65 GB now available
Post-back up thinning complete: 1 expired backups removed
Backup completed successfully.

Time machine back up external too?

Will the TM back up my external drive as well as internal? I have all my music and pictures on an external drive currently. Will TM back up the external drive that contains all my music and picture files provided the external is always plugged in and "on" throught the USB port on the imac. (I will have a seperate External drive for TM) Thanks.

kroes wrote:
It reads Master Boot record and Fat 32 (MS-DOS).
I have been using this for two years with my macbook with no problems and have it hooked into my imac with no problems but it seems to be formatted with windows? How could it even write or read files? What do I need to do to format it GUID? Do I have to wipe the drive? What do I do with all my photos and music that is already on the drive?
I thought I'd read that TM would only back-up Mac OS Extended partitions on GUID or APM drives (even though OSX can read FAT32 partitions on MBR drives), but now I can't find that documented anywhere, so I'm not sure. (I don't do Windoze.)
Perhaps Kappy or V.K. (the "gurus" of such things) will clarify this.

Search finds way too many files

I'm speaking of the Search field you get in Finder when you press command+f: Other than files in application packages, I have two files that have a certain word in the file name, but Finder's command+f pulls back 98, all of them "regular" documents, like PDFs, Numbers, etc., and all but two do not have that word in the file name but they do have the word within the file. The Search field says "name contains:" -- so can get Finder to find only the file names and ignore those with the word inside the file (without using a third-party application)?

What? You don't like the fact that the new Spotlight makes it almost impossible to find things by name only and not the metadata content? I don't either, but can only suggest File a bug report with Apple against this loss of functionality or use a 3rd-party app.
iMac refurb (27-inch Mid 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9.4), SL & ML, G4 450 MP w/Leopard, 9.2.2

How to restore Time Machine back-up if not even Recovery Tools work?

After a hard and unexpected crash on 2012 macMini I tried everything from this list: OS X Yosemite: Ways to start up your Mac Only 2 things worked: hardware test (via Ethernet: option+D; everything passed) and detailed status mode (command+V) which listed a bunch of errors concerning booting (missing or corrupted files and/or folders). Which is probably the reason I couldn't launch Recovery Tools - neither locally nor directly via Internet (Ethernet plugged in, option+command+R). I would get the message that the Tools are launching, but after the Apple logo showed up followed by the spinning circle, the screen would go light grey 4-5 seconds into the process and the thin black progress bar would appear. It would grow to 1/3 of its length, stop for several seconds, then the computer would restart, the bar would show up again, grow to 1/3 etc., etc.
Assuming that nothing else could be done I started the mini in the target mode (T), plugged it into my old 2007 mini and re-formatted the internal drive, thinking that I could either try Recovery Tools again (no luck) or just clean install Yosemite on the 2012 mini first and then use my Time Machine back-up to restore my files. Unfortunately 2007 mini can only install Lion - even on the external drive - but nothing higher (so I can't upgrade to Mountain Lion, Mavericks and finally to Yosemite). And 2012 would not start with Lion on it. Still no luck with Internet Recovery Tools btw (same symptoms).
The only other thing I can think of is finding a newer Mac and use it to install Mavericks or Yosemite on my 2012 mini. If this fails, it's a trip to the Apple store.
If anyone has any other ideas, please share.
(2012 has no CD/DVD drive)

Your description of Internet Recovery sounded much like Safe Mode, not Internet Recovery. I don't think you will see an Apple at all. It should be a spinning Globe. Or, when you say "spinning circle" was that the globe spinning?
From the App Store on the 2007 mini, can you download the Yosemite installer?
That's about all I can think of besides taking it to an Apple Store.

Trouble transferring iPhoto library from a time machine back up.

Hi!
I recently upgraded to the new OS and decided to do a clean install as my mac book pro is running a little slow. I did a time machine back up to save my files. When i went to put my iphoto library back it would not work as i needed the newest version of iphoto (i think i had the same one from when i got the laptop in 2009!). So i updated to the newest version and was able to retrieve the photos. The problem is i now have multiple copies of photos some with good and some with poor quality. I also have multiples of many photos and thousands of 'faces' grabbed by iphoto. Now with almost 40,000 photos its almost impossible to sort through. Any ideas how i can get my old, organized library back?
Thanks so much!
Erin

You need to restore the library from the TM backup by opening TM
and doing it from within TM:
OT

Access mailboxes in time machine back up

My hard drive crashed and I had to replace it with a new one.
On my previous drive I was running Mountain Lion, I upgraded to Maverick on the new drive.
I have my previous drive backed up on time machine, but was unable to restore from a time machine back up, before installing Maverick (files corrupted)
I absolutely need to get back my old mailboxes from Time Machine !
How do I access the hidden library in my time machine back up?
Now that I have Maverick, it is not entering my Mountain lion back ups when I enter time machine.
The back ups are of course vivible on my finder desktop on the back up drive.
Is there a way to access the hidden library in the time machine back up without entering time machine?

I am accessing through the TM interface. The TM interface has multiple folders on this particular weeks back-up. Some I can access and get to the files inside and some I do not have access to. Unfortunately, the folder I want to access and find the single file contains over 200,000 files. If I were to restore the folder, it would overwrite three months worth of files and make them outdated. I need to get access into the folder and restore that individual file.
Is there a way to restore on a second external drive to keep out current files in tack?
Brian

HT201250 I had files stored on a hard drive that were not on my Mac. I used the hard drive for my first Time Machine back up, but it was not enough hard drive space to finish. Now those stored files are gone. Is there any way I can recover them?

I had files stored on a hard drive that were not on my Mac. I used the hard drive for my first Time Machine back up, but it was not enough hard drive space to finish. Now those stored files are gone. Is there any way I can recover them? No, they were not part of previous Time Machine backups, and I have checked both the hard drive the documents were lost on and the new one that I now use for backups. Any suggestions would be helpful, as the lost files are old pictures that are gone forever. :[ Thanks!

1. Yes, if both drives are formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
2. Reformat the drives if needed, open the Time Machine pane of System Preferences, and remove the drive with the pictures from the list of items set to be excluded.
(110331)

Time Machine backing up way too many files

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