Time Machine hangs... Takes hours to do an incremental back up

Hello All,
I'm having trouble with Time Machine as of late. It seems to hang and not finish a backup (I'm not talking about the initial back up, I know they take a while).
I leave my MBP running all the time (fans are on to keep it cool, over heating not an issue) and I've noticed that after the 4th day all bets are off on a reliable backup. Usually it waits till the 2 week mark then freaks out but now it's happening more often and sooner.
I'll refrain from expressing my opinion as the Apple people don't seem to like freedom of speech as my last post got flagged when I expressed my displeasure with Snow Leopard. I'm having a lot of problems that I didn't have before the upgrade.
To the Apple people, THIS IS A REAL ISSUE I'M HAVING; note the opening statement explaining my problem. Please don't remove my post again unless you're going to contact me with how to fix it. This should not be considered "Feed Back" as I'm asking my fellow OSX users for help. Thank you!
Thank you for any advice or tips on how to fix the problem.

EricB73 wrote:
I'll refrain from expressing my opinion as the Apple people don't seem to like freedom of speech as my last post got flagged when I expressed my displeasure with Snow Leopard.
Your best bet is to omit opinions, especially negative ones. Mainly because they don't help us help you. And if they don't get deleted, many of us who try to help people just skip them, as the posters often are more interesting in ranting than working through a problem. And "freedom of speech" doesn't apply here -- this is not a government throwing you in jail, it's Apple saying you agreed to certain terms and conditions when you signed-up to use the forums they provide at no cost. Like it or not, those are the rules.
That said, you can use the Time Machine Buddy to navigate back a few days in your logs. Use the small navigation arrows after the title "Messages;" the arrow in front will show or drop the message detail. If you can find the most recent backup that was a problem, copy and post the messages here.
Do the sizes of the backups seem reasonable, considering what you've added or changed since the last one? If they seem too large, that may be part of the problem. See #D4 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip* at the top of this forum.
You might also try the things in #D2 of that Tip.

Similar Messages

I am using 10.9.1 on a 21.5" iMac. I am backing up using Time Machine. The hourly backups are over kill. How do get TM to backup daily?

I am using 10.9.1 on a 21.5" iMac. I am backing up using Time Machine. The hourly backups are over kill. How do get TM to backup daily, only?

See Pondini's TM FAQs, for details.

Time machine really takes its time

my time machine usually takes about 2 min to back up, for the last week its been taking AT LEAST 30 min to prepare the back up, then when it finally gets going, it backs up at snail pace. its now taken 3 min to do 6kb.
why is this? anyone with ideas/help/something?
thanks
ste

have a look @ [this_|http://web.me.com/pondini/TimeMachine/D2.html] user tip by Pondini.
JGG

I have been using time machine to back up my Mac Book Pro 3.1 to my Time Capsule. Now the Time machine hangs up on "calculating time remaining".

I have been using time machine to back up my Mac Book Pro 3.1 to my Time Capsule. Now the Time machine hangs up on "calculating time remaining".
Mac Book Pro - 3.1-15-inch 2.4/2.2GHz), Processor 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Operating system : OS X 10.10.1
Time Machine Version 1.3, Copyright 2007-2014 Apple Inc., Modified Tuesday, September 9, 2014 at 6:03 PM
Time Capsule: 500 GB C 2007
This Time Machine software worked satisfactory until Monday Nov, 10 2014 and I have backups until that time. For several years, the software deleted the oldest back up to save the latest one. This is acceptable to me as I have off site storage that is updated every 3 months. How do I get Time machine working again?

I have spent a couple of days trying to respond to Linc Davis. Finally I figured it out . The following is a copy of data from my console from the initiation of a time machine backup until it gets stuck trying to calculate the time remaining. There is no indication that anything starts saving. I copied about 3 minutes of data. This is probably way too much data, but I do not know what is relevant.
Thanks for the help,
calcool
12/22/14 3:16:54.655 PM com.apple.backupd[551]: Starting manual backup
12/22/14 3:16:55.057 PM com.apple.backupd[551]: Attempting to mount network destination URL: afp://”name”%20”lastname”@Home%20Network%20Time%20Capsule._afpovertcp._tcp.loca l./Time%20Capsule
12/22/14 3:16:57.262 PM mds[33]: (Volume.Normal:2464) volume:0x7fed5ab54000 ********** Bootstrapped Creating a default store:0 SpotLoc:(null) SpotVerLoc:(null) occlude:0 /Volumes/Time Capsule
12/22/14 3:16:57.565 PM com.apple.backupd[551]: Mounted network destination at mount point: /Volumes/Time Capsule using URL: afp://”name”%20”lastname”@Home%20Network%20Time%20Capsule._afpovertcp._tcp.loca l./Time%20Capsule
12/22/14 3:17:08.000 PM kernel[0]: hfs: mounted Backup of “name” “lastname”’s MacBook Pro on device disk3s2
12/22/14 3:17:09.625 PM com.apple.backupd[551]: Disk image /Volumes/Time Capsule/”name” “lastname”’s MacBook Pro (2).sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Backup of “name” “lastname”’s MacBook Pro
12/22/14 3:17:11.112 PM com.apple.backupd[551]: Backing up to /dev/disk3s2: /Volumes/Backup of “name” “lastname”’s MacBook Pro/Backups.backupdb
12/22/14 3:17:24.931 PM “name”[593]: audit warning: soft /var/audit
12/22/14 3:17:24.944 PM “name”[594]: audit warning: allsoft
12/22/14 3:17:24.958 PM “name”[596]: audit warning: closefile /var/audit/20141222201654.20141222201724
12/22/14 3:17:26.544 PM com.apple.backupd[551]: Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Macintosh HD
12/22/14 3:17:34.767 PM com.apple.backupd[551]: Deep event scan at path:/ reason:must scan subdirs|new event db|
12/22/14 3:17:34.768 PM com.apple.backupd[551]: Reading cached event database from: /Volumes/Backup of “name” “lastname”’s MacBook Pro/Backups.backupdb/”name” “lastname”’s MacBook Pro (2)/2014-12-22-151726.inProgress/F85FEA51-E137-471A-84DA-A2C00E4ECB42/.1BEF88C6 -20C3-3DDC-AE30-05EAB2AFCC15.eventdb
12/22/14 3:17:38.115 PM com.apple.backupd[551]: Using cached disk scan
12/22/14 3:17:39.114 PM com.apple.backupd[551]: Saved event cache at /Volumes/Backup of “name” “lastname”’s MacBook Pro/Backups.backupdb/”name” “lastname”’s MacBook Pro (2)/2014-12-22-151726.inProgress/5BC46A53-25E8-4C4A-8947-AFB221D1FA0C/.1BEF88C6 -20C3-3DDC-AE30-05EAB2AFCC15.eventdb
12/22/14 3:17:39.355 PM com.apple.backupd[551]: Not using file event preflight for Macintosh HD
12/22/14 3:19:14.782 PM CoreServicesUIAgent[294]: unexpected message <OS_xpc_error: <error: 0x7fff77befc60> { count = 1, contents =
"XPCErrorDescription" => <string: 0x7fff77beff70> { length = 18, contents = "Connection invalid" }
}>
12/22/14 3:20:15.207 PM locationd[182]: Location icon should now be in state 'Active'
12/22/14 3:20:17.267 PM locationd[182]: Location icon should now be in state 'Inactive'
12/22/14 3:20:17.884 PM locationd[182]: Location icon should now be in state 'Active'
12/22/14 3:20:18.483 PM sandboxd[296]: ([310]) com.apple.metada(310) deny mach-lookup com.apple.cfnetwork.cfnetworkagent
12/22/14 3:20:21.646 PM com.apple.metadata.SpotlightNetHelper[310]: [SLSUGGESTIONS] Location managed failed with error Error Domain=kCLErrorDomain Code=0 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (kCLErrorDomain error 0.)"
12/22/14 3:20:23.892 PM WindowServer[143]: disable_update_timeout: UI updates were forcibly disabled by application "Spotlight" for over 1.00 seconds. Server has re-enabled them.
12/22/14 3:20:26.526 PM WindowServer[143]: common_reenable_update: UI updates were finally reenabled by application "Spotlight" after 3.63 seconds (server forcibly re-enabled them after 1.00 seconds)
12/22/14 3:20:28.298 PM sandboxd[296]: ([310]) com.apple.metada(310) deny mach-lookup com.apple.cfnetwork.cfnetworkagent
12/22/14 3:20:29.094 PM com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.quicklook[599]) Endpoint has been activated through legacy launch(3) APIs. Please switch to XPC or bootstrap_check_in(): com.apple.quicklook
12/22/14 3:20:30.670 PM bird[263]: Assertion failed: ![_xpcClients containsObject:client]
12/22/14 3:20:30.670 PM bird[263]: Assertion failed: ![_xpcClients containsObject:client]
12/22/14 3:20:32.294 PM com.apple.InputMethodKit.UserDictionary[600]: -[PFUbiquitySwitchboardEntryMetadata setUseLocalStorage:](808): CoreData: Ubiquity: “name”~00000000-0000-1000-8000-001B63947FCF:UserDictionary
Using local storage: 1
12/22/14 3:20:32.317 PM bird[263]: Assertion failed: ![_xpcClients containsObject:client]
12/22/14 3:20:32.769 PM locationd[182]: Location icon should now be in state 'Inactive'
12/22/14 3:20:34.580 PM Console[601]: Failed to connect (_consoleX) outlet from (NSApplication) to (ConsoleX): missing setter or instance variable
12/22/14 3:20:35.540 PM com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.imfoundation.IMRemoteURLConnectionAgent) The _DirtyJetsamMemoryLimit key is not available on this platform.
12/22/14 3:20:36.388 PM com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.auditd[604]) Endpoint has been activated through legacy launch(3) APIs. Please switch to XPC or bootstrap_check_in(): com.apple.auditd
12/22/14 3:20:36.693 PM “name”[608]: audit warning: soft /var/audit
12/22/14 3:20:36.718 PM “name”[607]: audit warning: allsoft
12/22/14 3:20:37.045 PM “name”[610]: audit warning: closefile /var/audit/20141222201724.20141222202036
12/22/14 3:20:37.438 PM bird[263]: Assertion failed: ![_xpcClients containsObject:client]
12/22/14 3:20:42.437 PM QuickLookSatellite[611]: CGSConnectionByID: 0 is not a valid connection ID.
12/22/14 3:20:42.437 PM QuickLookSatellite[611]: Invalid Connection ID 0
12/22/14 3:20:42.477 PM QuickLookSatellite[611]: CGSConnectionByID: 0 is not a valid connection ID.
12/22/14 3:20:42.477 PM QuickLookSatellite[611]: CGSConnectionByID: 0 is not a valid connection ID.
12/22/14 3:20:42.612 PM QuickLookSatellite[611]: [QL] No sandbox token for request <QLThumbnailRequest stackshot.log>, it will probably fail
12/22/14 3:20:42.613 PM QuickLookSatellite[611]: [QL] No sandbox token for thumbnail request file:///Library/Logs/stackshot.log, it will probably fail
12/22/14 3:20:42.615 PM QuickLookSatellite[611]: [QL] No sandbox token for request <QLThumbnailRequest stackshot-syms.log>, it will probably fail
12/22/14 3:20:42.615 PM QuickLookSatellite[611]: [QL] No sandbox token for thumbnail request file:///Library/Logs/stackshot-syms.log, it will probably fail

Backups work, enter time machine "hangs"

I'm having an issue with Time Machine where the backups appear to be working fine, but if I open a folder in finder, and then "Enter Time Machine", Time Machine starts with that folder "visible" but hangs (no nav buttons work, cancel and restore don't work, and I can't "navigate folders).
The only way "out" in this case is to hit CMD-OPT-ESC, which weirdly doesn't bring up the terminate applications dialog, but simply exits Time Machine.
If I make sure that no finder windows are open when I enter Time Machine, it appears to be working fine.
To duplicate this, open your home folder, have Documents selected and enter time machine. Does your's hang at this point? (Hit CMD-OPT-ESC to leave Time Machine if it does hang).
TIA for any advice/confirmation.
Steve

It appears I may have "misspoken" a little. Time Machine hangs on entry with no default windows too, just "not as much". I can usually move around a little before it hang, but hang it does.
One side note (and this may cause this thread to be moved to a Leopard issue instead of time machine.
I recently upgraded to Leopard by buying a brand new drive, installing Leopard from scratch, and gradually adding back my applications as I find I need them (the previous drive had been through 10.1 -> 10.4.11 over a couple years, and had a lot of old apps, etc I just wanted to get rid of.)
With the new installation, it appears that occasionally (30% of the time?), when I mount/dismount .dmg images or sparseimage/sparsebundle images, the entire Mac will appear to "hang" for about 30-40 seconds, buffering input but otherwise appearing to "lock up". I have iTunes playing, and songs continue uninterrupted, but I can't do anything for this 30-40 seconds, including CMD-OPT-ESC.
I'm thinking this could be related to the Time Machine issue except for the fact that the OS always recovers and continues normally after 30+ seconds, but Time Machine NEVER comes back.
Thoughts? Advice?
Thanks,
Steve

Time Machine Hangs in 10.9

Time Machine not happy since upgrade to 10.9. Waited three days for Time Machine to perform a backup after the upgrade. Got nowhere, backed up less that 1MB in 3 days. So erased dedicated 1 TB backup disk, re-selected as TM disk and restarted Time Machine.
My hard disk is set never to sleep. So far, Time Machine has taken four days to get to:
"Backing Up: 496.06GB of 571.26GB"
It has been stuck at this point for 24 hours. But I can hear the hard disk working constantly. Activity Monitor attributes this to a kernal process. Not sure what to do. Fear my hard disk will give up the ghost at this rate before completing a single Time Machine backup.
Anyone got any idea what I should do?
Thank you in advance.

Add me to the list.
My essentially new MacBook Pro, barely used, upgraded from 10.7.2 to 10.7.5 and Time Machine became a glacier, constantly stuck on Processing.
Formatted external drive, looked promising, eventually stopped backing up. Deleted Time Machine preferences, reformatted external on another Mac and gave it a new name, plugged it in to MacBook Pro, told Time Machine to use it, zipped up to about 3GB in 3 Min. and then molasses. Better than before, currently at 12GB of 36GB in about 4 hours, but still pathetic.
As an Apple Certified Tech, have seen so many problems with Time Machine, especially the weird pausing on the initial run, hard to tell when slowness is normal or problematic.
Trying to get through to Apple Tech Support, but it being Day One of iPhone 5, can't.
Please keep this thread going and post any knowledge breakthroughs.

Time Machine hanging, I/O error

Hi, I'm having problems with Time Machine hanging partway through a backup to an external Firewire HD. I've tried repartitioning the drive, turning off Spotlight. I tried zeroing out the partition that I'm trying to back up into and ended up with Disk Utility hanging. Does this mean, as I suspect, that the drive is dying?
A sample of Console output during attempted backup looks like this:
4/30/14 7:52:30.000 PM kernel[0]: disk1s3: I/O error.
4/30/14 7:53:00.000 PM kernel[0]: disk1s3: I/O error.
4/30/14 7:54:22.000 PM kernel[0]: IOSCSIPeripheralDeviceType00::setPowerState(0xdc880163fa41ee73, 3 -> 2) timed out after 102005 ms
4/30/14 7:56:04.000 PM kernel[0]: IOSCSIPeripheralDeviceType00::setPowerState(0xdc880163fa41ee73, 2 -> 4) timed out after 101973 ms
4/30/14 7:57:30.000 PM kernel[0]: disk1s3: I/O error.
4/30/14 7:57:30.151 PM com.apple.backupd[326]: Copied 92.12 GB of 170.2 GB, 879310 of 1029040 items
4/30/14 8:03:05.000 PM kernel[0]: disk1s3: I/O error.
4/30/14 8:03:35.000 PM kernel[0]: disk1s3: I/O error.
While trying to zero out the partition I got similar messages:
5/1/14 3:32:06.468 AM fseventsd[48]: read_disk_log: problems with history file: /Volumes/Backup Partition/.fseventsd/000000000072fd18 (fd -1, errno 5 ; is_reg 0; uid 0/0 gid 0/0)
5/1/14 3:40:52.866 AM Google Chrome Helper[638]: Process unable to create connection because the sandbox denied the right to lookup com.apple.coreservices.launchservicesd and so this process cannot talk to launchservicesd. : LSXPCClient.cp #426 ___ZN26LSClientToServerConnection21setupServerConnectionEiPK14__CFDictionary_bl ock_invoke() q=com.apple.main-thread
5/1/14 3:40:52.867 AM Google Chrome Helper[638]: Process unable to create connection because the sandbox denied the right to lookup com.apple.coreservices.launchservicesd and so this process cannot talk to launchservicesd.
5/1/14 3:40:52.881 AM Google Chrome Helper[638]: CGSLookupServerRootPort: Failed to look up the port for "com.apple.windowserver.active" (1100)
5/1/14 3:42:02.821 AM ntpd[118]: ntpd: time set -0.525679 s
5/1/14 3:42:02.858 AM com.apple.time[235]: Interval maximum value is 946100000 seconds (specified value: 9223372036854775807).
5/1/14 3:57:36.000 AM kernel[0]: disk1s3: I/O error.
5/1/14 3:58:06.000 AM kernel[0]: disk1s3: I/O error.
5/1/14 3:58:36.000 AM kernel[0]: disk1s3: I/O error.
5/1/14 3:59:06.000 AM kernel[0]: disk1s3: I/O error.
Thanks in advance for any help.

Hi Tom, Mr. Fore,
Thanks for your quick replies. I thought since I had the Canon on its own port it would avoid the conflicts noted in the forum, but if there's only one bus that would explain things. Bummer. It's too much of a nuisance to move large files around so capturing to the internal HD isn't a long-term solution even if I got it working (that still produced the timecode problem).
I guess I have two weeks to search for a fix or a new camera before the store return policy expires.

Time Machine Hangs - Help!

I am trying to run Time Machine for the first time on this PowerBook G4.
Three times now backup has gotten to 11.07GB of 36.72GB, then stops progressing.
The backup drive is a 500 GB Maxtor USB drive that I used Disk Utility on to erase and format as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
The widget "Time Machine Buddy" shows the following:
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/Backup Drive/Backups.backupdb
Ownership is disabled on the backup destination volume. Enabling.
Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: HD
Backup content size: 36.8 GB excluded items size: 33.1 MB for volume HD
No pre-backup thinning needed: 44.07 GB requested (including padding), 465.61 GB available
Waiting for index to be ready (909 > 0)
Any help or insight would be appreciated. Thanks.

Very curious. I'd guess your CPU usage is running at or near 100% at all times, no?
Some threads here suspect memory, though, for Bus Errors. Have you added memory, especially 3rd party? You might try running hardware diagnostics. If you're not having any other trouble, this seems doubtful.
Mdworker is associated with Spotlight. First thought here is, have you excluded your TM drive/partition from Spotlight? If no, do so, at least temporarily. (Use System Preferences/Spotlight, then it's Privacy pane.)
If it's trying to index your TM drive and repeatedly crashing, writing crash logs, and restarting, it's likely using-up most of your CPU, slowing the backup to a near halt. Actually, you might want, temporarily, to exclude EVERYTHING from Spotlight -- it's probably completely confused.
You can use the Activity Monitor app (Applications/Utilities) to see how much CPU is being used by mdworker, etc. Select All Processes, then sort by the CPU column.
Once it's under control, start TM again. If your backup then runs normally, that will confirm the problem, and you can begin to remove things from the exclusion list.
You've also probably got a whole passel (technical term) of crash logs and huge system logs. You can clean them out via the Console app, or with OnyX or similar apps.

I just backed up my 1TB (mostly full) internal hard drive to an external 1TB Time Machine drive, and it says I'm fully backed up. Why is the Time Machine drive only half full?

I have a 1TB internal drive in my MacBook Pro (15", mid-2009, running Snow Leopard). A couple days ago I decided to format my unused 1TB external drive and use it for Time Machine, so I could wipe/format my internal drive for the Mavericks upgrade I've been putting off. Time Machine backed up the entire drive, and it appears to have successfully worked! Except that Finder shows 157 gigs free on my internal drive and 463 gigs free on the external... I'm hesitant to erase everything in case some stuff didn't get backed up and might disappear. A Google search tells me that Time Machine doesn't compress files at all... so where the heck did those 300 gigs go? Is there really 300 gigs of stuff on my internal drive that Time Machine just decided didn't need to be backed up?

By default Time Machine will not back up all files, i.e. temp file, cache, and system files. Also you can set Time Machine to exclude some folders/files, take a look at this link for more information. http://pondini.org/TM/11.html

Had hard drive renewed due to product recall (iMac) backed up complete system on time machine . Had the drive done got mac back tried to reinstall from time machine .The new drive tells me that the space has been taken up but can't find where the file hav

Had hard drive renewed due to product recall (iMac) backed up complete system on time machine . Had the drive done got mac back tried to reinstall from time machine .The new drive tells me that the space has been taken up but can't find where the file have gone. Need to free up the space that the ghost file take up so I can drag drop from ex drive onto harddrive

Here's the scoop, new friend.....
When you boot into Time Machine you'll get the same OS X Utilities screen as you would if you booted into the Recovery HD. So, from there go into Disk Utilities to erase/format your internal drive. After that's done, back out to the OS X Utilities screen and select the restore option. Just follow the prompts to select the TM back up date you want to restore from and where to restore it to. Pretty straight forward.

HT201250 Can I include external drives to be backed up using Time Machine. Not only do I want to back up my IMac, but I have several extenal drives for one iPhoto, one iTunes and one for other files & documents.

Can I include external drives to be backed up using Time Machine? Not only do I want to back up my IMac, but I have several extenal drives for one iPhoto, one iTunes and one for other files & documents. How do I know if they are included in the backup process?

Yes, if they are not exclude then TM backs them up.
Allan

I recently did a full reinstall from my time machine and now my MacBook pro won't back up to the time machine. It starts a full backup ignoring the original back up, can anyone help?

I recently did a full reinstall from my time machine and now my MacBook pro won't back up to the time machine. It starts a full backup ignoring the original back up, can anyone help?

Did you follow the instructions on the page linked below?
OS X Yosemite: Recover your entire system

I am using a WD My Passport Studio external hard drive as a Time Machine. I get the error that a back up folder could not be created when my iMac has been asleep, any advice.

I am using a WD My Passport Studio external hard drive as a Time Machine. I get the error that a back up folder could not be created when my iMac has been asleep, any advice. The hard drive is set set not to go to sleep.

Were you not plugged in via USB to begin with?
I would recommend performing some resets just to be on the safe side. Unplug the external HD, and try these steps:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

If I update from 10.6.8 to Mavericks and I have a time machine backup, can I do a full restore back to 10.6.8 and resume as if I had never updated?

If I update from 10.6.8 to Mavericks and I have a time machine backup, can I do a full restore back to 10.6.8 and resume as if I had never updated if there is a problem? Probably an answer I should know but I don't. Thanks in advance! (instruction suggestions welcomed)

Upgrading the OS is a system wide thing. So all users will receive the upgrade.
It should not delete files and such. However, if you have for example files made with Pages '09. Then the new Pages that comes with Mavericks will make a copy of those files so you can continue to edit them. But those new files can not be opened in Pages '09. BUT again, some people perfer Pages '09 and they use that still. Mavericks will just hide Pages '09, it's still usable in Mavericks just hidden.
To be safe, make a back up of your system before doing any major upgrade.
KOT

I accidentally combined all of my photos on iphoto to be one event. i have it the way i want it saved on my external harddrive from time machine. how do i make my computer go back to that

i accidentally combined all of my photos on iphoto to be one event. i have it the way i want it saved on my external harddrive from time machine. how do i make my computer go back to that

Open Time Machine to the date that you know the iPhoto Library is in the format you want and select and Restore it.
http://pondini.org/TM/15.html
Ciao.

Time Machine hangs... Takes hours to do an incremental back up

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for