Time machine running slow and slowing network access

Question

I have had and continue to have issues with wifi on my MBP.  Those are pretty well summarized in https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5535320?start=30&tstart=0.  I've been able to make mt system usable with some of the less dodgy workarounds in that thread ( like keeping a ping on my router running )
That thread really doesn't mention the issues I've been having with time machine though, so I thought I'd bring this up here.  Whenever time machine starts up, Safari and mail become unresponsive.  It's worst when TM is "preparing" of "cleaningup", though barely usable during the actual backup.  Mostly, I can work around that too, but occationally, TM will find GB of data to be backed up and lock up my mac for a day.  Here's a recent example:
2/16/14 12:30:27.952 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Starting automatic backup
2/16/14 12:30:28.466 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Attempting to mount network destination URL: afp://;AUTH=No%20User%20Authent@MyBookLive._afpovertcp._tcp.local/TimeMachine
2/16/14 12:30:33.866 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Mounted network destination at mount point: /Volumes/TimeMachine using URL: afp://;AUTH=No%20User%20Authent@MyBookLive._afpovertcp._tcp.local/TimeMachine
2/16/14 12:31:44.678 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Disk image /Volumes/TimeMachine/sparky.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
2/16/14 12:31:46.613 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Backing up to /dev/disk2s2: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
2/16/14 12:34:07.904 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Will copy (1.66 GB) from Macintosh HD
2/16/14 12:34:08.004 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Found 83487 files (1.66 GB) needing backup
2/16/14 12:34:08.738 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: 4.16 GB required (including padding), 445.21 GB available
2/16/14 1:32:33.579 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 534.6 MB of 1.66 GB, 28317 of 83487 items
2/16/14 2:40:02.513 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 564.1 MB of 1.66 GB, 30225 of 83487 items
2/16/14 3:46:20.853 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 593.2 MB of 1.66 GB, 31631 of 83487 items
2/16/14 4:48:19.461 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 621.8 MB of 1.66 GB, 33182 of 83487 items
2/16/14 5:00:31.968 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Bulk setting Spotlight attributes failed.
2/16/14 5:54:51.036 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 658 MB of 1.66 GB, 34773 of 83487 items
2/16/14 6:17:20.839 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Bulk setting Spotlight attributes failed.
2/16/14 6:56:27.566 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 688.2 MB of 1.66 GB, 36246 of 83487 items
2/16/14 7:57:07.076 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 704.8 MB of 1.66 GB, 37267 of 83487 items
2/16/14 8:58:52.469 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 730.7 MB of 1.66 GB, 38724 of 83487 items
2/16/14 10:09:42.807 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 760.5 MB of 1.66 GB, 40291 of 83487 items
2/16/14 11:21:25.825 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 803.8 MB of 1.66 GB, 42462 of 83487 items
2/17/14 12:30:58.322 AM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 834.1 MB of 1.66 GB, 43513 of 83487 items
2/17/14 1:45:28.495 AM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 846.1 MB of 1.66 GB, 44160 of 83487 items
2/17/14 2:45:36.010 AM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 868.6 MB of 1.66 GB, 45485 of 83487 items
2/17/14 3:57:29.939 AM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 890.6 MB of 1.66 GB, 46729 of 83487 items
2/17/14 5:07:30.971 AM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 926.7 MB of 1.66 GB, 48695 of 83487 items
2/17/14 6:15:49.283 AM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 963.7 MB of 1.66 GB, 50583 of 83487 items
This is on an AC router.  My peak throughput shows 19 Mb/s on menu meters, so, not great, but not this slow.  Mostly, the network activity is nothing with short bursts of higher throughput.
I'm hoping this will be addressed in 10.9.2.  In the mean time, are there any workarounds to get past this issue short of turning off TM?
Thanks,
Horst

Answer 1

These instructions were taken from Mac OS X Hints at:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050302225659382
The Unix program dd is a disk copying util that you can use at the command line in order to make a disk image. It makes a bit-by-bit copy of the drive it's copying, caring nothing about filesystem type, files, or anything else. It's a great way to workaround the need for Norton Ghost.
Normally, in order to make a disk image, the disk you're copying from has to be able to spin up and talk -- in other words, it's OK to make a copy if the disk is healthy. But what happens when your disk is becoming a doorstop? As long as it continues to spin, even with physical damage on the drive, dd and Mac OS X will get you out of the fire.
We had a situation recently where a friend sent a disk to us that had hard physical errors on it. It would boot in Windows, but then it would hit one of these scratch marks and just die. We fired up dd, and it started OK, but stopped at the same physical error location -- complaining about a Hard Error.
So the workaround was to designate the dd mode as noerror -- which just slides over the hard stops, and to add the mode sync, which fills the image with nulls at that point. We did it on BSD Unix, but as long as you can get the hard drive attached to your Mac, the command is the same:
dd bs=512 if=/dev/rXX# of=/some_dir/foo.dmg conv=noerror,sync
The bs=512 designates block size, and the if=/dev/rXX# is the UNIX path to the actual disk device. Make sure that the chosen directory (some_dir) has enough room to take the entire disk image -- which will be equal to the size of the drive. Since dd doesn't care about the contents of the drive, it copies every bit on the thing, so you get an image equal to the disk's capacity. A really big file. One workaround is to put it on a RAID array.
Once you've established the disk image (in this example, foo.dmg), you're almost home. Here's where your Mac OS X box is far and away the best thing to have. In this example, the dd output file is foo.dmg. You have to realize that this is an exact copy of a busted drive, but the "holes" are filled with nulls. As long as the damage isn't to the boot sector, though, when you double-click on it, Mac OS X mounts it without breathing hard ... who cares if it's FAT32, NTFS, whatever.
Due to the size of the image that we were copying, we put it on a RAID array, and had to access the image over the network -- it still mounted fine. In straight UNIX, if you try to mount a disk image, it complains that there is "no block device" and fails. Once your image is mounted, it appears in your Finder, and then it's easy work to retrieve the critical files from the image -- usually things like .doc files and .xls files and the lot.
Finally, since your disk is actually dying, once you have your image, you can drop it to tape or something and you've not only recovered your files, you've made a viable backup as well. Once again, that which destroys a Windows box becomes a play thing to a Mac OS X box.