Time Machine Slow? Kill Norton AntiVirus

After reading all of the posts and trying absolutely everything, I read one post where a user mentioned turning off Norton AntiVirus. Of course Norton 10.0 is not even 10.5 OS ready, but I did not even think about it as this runs in the background. I was in the middle of the initial Time Machine backup which was going as slow as all of the others when I tried to reformat my LaCie drive etc....etc...etc...
So, I turned off Norton in the middle of the backup, and it speeded up instantly. From taking over an hour to copy 1.5gigs of my 86gig drive, it went through 5 gigs in about 10 minutes. I am SURE this is almost everyone's problem as Norton is not something that is transparent to us as it runs in the background. Hope this helps a few people. Time Machine has worked flawlessly for me since then.

I had the same problem while McAfee VirusScan was running. I'm now backing up to the Time Machine hard drive at about 2-3 G per minutes.

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Time Machine Slow & Backs Up Large Amounts of Data - The Fix

This is about Time Machine becoming very slow and taking hours to backup and trying to backup large amouts of data each time.
I spent a month on the phone with 2nd level Tech support and engineering - every other day.
I have 4 computers (one was a clients), all with different backup systems: Time Capsule over CAT 6 Gigabit Ethernet through a Thunderbolt monitor, internal eSata to external 6 TB RAID 5, Wireless to Time Capsule, Firewire 800 to External 2 TB RAID 1 dive.
With the install of 10.8.5 (the itermediate update to 10.9) I immedialety had Time Machine problems on all four computers. As I said, I spent a month talking with Apple. Also during this time I purchased 2 new MacBook Pro 13 Retinas. Installed Norton Internet Security 5 on them and they had the same problem. The new Retina's had 10.9 on them, so this is about 10.8.5 and 10.9.
After doing Data Capture on 3 of the computers for engineering (a new MBPro13R and my MacPro, and a MBPro 13 Mid-2012), engineering finally figured out what was happening.
Norton Internet Sucrity 5 for Mac is not longer compatible. As my 2nd level tech said: " Engineering told him, engineering needs to call Norton and figure out what they did to their program to cause this."
The fix is to completely remove Norton and all it's components (using the uninstall app inside the Symantec folder). Once you do that, Erase your backup drive, Restart everything, Re-connect your computer to your drive - then it immediately works perfectly.
Do Not Re-Install Norton.
I have now done this exact operation on 7 different machines. Time Machine works instantly. Time Machine is not the same program from 10.8 - it has been completely rebuilt, so I doesn't backup in the same way. But it works perfectly on all my computers now.
Don't forget the first backup will take hours since it is starting over clean and must do a complete backup the first time. After that it works fine.
I'm not going to put Norton back in my computers until I find that Norton has acknowledged this problem, or they come out with Norton Internet Security 6.
I reposted this here because on another post it was on the 20 page.
Hope this helps

Guitarfx wrote:
Time Machine has worked properly for me for several months. However, in the last week or two I have noticed some very strange behavior. Basically, Time Machine wants to backup virtually my entire system every few days or so.
How often do you let TM do backups? If it hasn't backed up for several days, it may indeed be doing a new, full, backup. Apple doesn't document this, but many folks believe it's about 10 days.
Download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget from: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/timemachinebuddy.html. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window.
It first shows the most recent backup. Navigate to one of the large backups, and examine the messages. If you see something there that seems suspicious, copy and post the messages here (be sure to get them all, as sometimes they overflow the small window).
I presume that for whatever reason, Time Machine believes my files are changing and therefore proceeds backing them all up. I can't really think of anything special I have done with my system in the last month which would cause this, but have tried formating my Time Capsule and starting over with a fresh backup--to no avail.
There are some applications that cause large backups, often because they use a single file, often a database, to store their data. Entourage is a common one: every time you send or receive a single message, the whole database is changed, and will be backed-up the next time. Apple mail, of course, stores messages individually to prevent this.
FileVault is similar, in an even bigger way: it converts your entire Home Folder into a single, encrypted disk image. So any change to anything in your Home Folder is treated as a change to the encrypted image. TM minimizes the impact, though, by only backing it up when you log out.
So consider this while examining the results from TimeTracker, as VA2020 recommended.

Time Machine slow to open

Although there are lots of threads about Timemachine being slow, my problem is slightly different. Timemachine appears to be backing up ok (though I've temporarily disabled backups now), but if I want to recover a file, it opens so slowly as to be almost useless.
When I click on Timemachine it seems as though there is no response. However, after a minute or two, I get a "Connecting to Timemachine" progress meter in Finder. After much longer, say 5 minutes, I get "Do you still want to connect to Timemachine, Backup Volume is now available".
After a few more minutes I'm in Time Machine, but all the controls (forward back arrows, right side bar etc) are frozen. After a very long time (not sure how long, as I gave up after 15 minutes and came back four hours later), the controls are now working, but oh so slowly. Clicking back through archives takes about 30 seconds to a minute for each movement. However, all the archives seem in place, and when I restore a file, though very slow to start (another minute or so with a progress meter) it actually uploads back to my machine quite quickly.
The Timemachine volume is 500GB and there are 53GB spare (>10%).
Okay - what have I done to fix this?
I've tried repairing the Time Machine volume with Disk Utility. I have three volumes on the one hard drive, Time Machine, a Super Dooper boot backup (I backup my docs in Timemachine and have a bootable backup without documents in Super Dooper) and another partition just spare. The two other volumes can be repaired and verified. When I repair the Time Machine volume I get the following:
"Verify and Repair volume “Time Machine 2”
Volume repair complete.Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.Error: Couldn’t unmount disk."
And sure enough, if I try manually unmounting the disk, after an interminable wait (>10mins) it fails. Not sure why this matters though? I want it mounted to use it, don't I? However, I infer from this that it's Time machine, not the Hard drive that is the issue, since the other volumes work.
I searched in Console for errrors associated with Timemachine speed problems (backing up). I found I had lots of these errors,
sandboxd: mdworker deny mach-lookup com.apple.ls.boxd
mdworker: Unable to talk to lsboxd
which I removed, as recommended, by doing a safe boot.
However, now in console I have lots of these errrors:
xx/xx/xxx xx:xx AM com.apple.launchd[1]: (com.apple.sleepservicesd[6326]) Exited: Killed: 9
In other discussions this seems to be associated with Screen and computer freezing, but mine is more glaciating than freezing, that is, it's frozen but it still works! Also, it appears to be only Time machine. However, the errors don't appear to correlate with opening or doing anything with Time machine - the errors are around all the time.
Any ideas?

Yes, I agree, the disk, though no longer inaccessible to disk utility repair, still seems to have some problems. It has now been shown to be slow across a range of actons, not just Timemachine. Timemachine has improved slightly in its response when retrieving files. It now takes 3 to 4 minutes to open and make files selectable, rather than the 7 to 10 before, and I'm not getting the progress meter and then "Do you still want to connect to Timemachine, Backup Volume is now available" message before this happens.
We've just bought a MBP, so I now need to get a backup solution for multiple machines, so I'll move to a Timecapsule or some other kind of shared backup.
Thanks again for your assistance.

Time machine slow

Though the upgrade is very nice, the time machine backup seems extremely slow. It has been running now for over 48 hours and only 66/86 GB has been backed up. I am wondering if this might be a function of the wire (from the hard drive to the MacBook Pro) I am using: I am using the USB 2.0 port instead of the firewire 800 port. Might that have made a difference? And, I usually bring my laptop from work to home--its been sitting at work until the backup is finished. Would all be for naught if I disconnected to bring the computer home and then reconnected once I returned to work?

To add to the Slow Time Machine discussion:
I have a dual quad-core and three internal 750GB drives. I'm using the second drive as my Time Machine drive.
It took several hours to do the initial backup (as I expected) and it was about 93GB. I installed Leopard this past Thursday. I'm EST and it is just after 10am EST, but looking in Time Machine, these are what Time Machine shows as being available to me:
Today (now)
Today at 6:00 AM
Today at 12:11 AM
Yesterday at 8:07 PM
Yesterday at 3:18 PM
Yesterday at 9:35 AM
So much for hourly backups. And I know it isn't just that there were no changes made because the current Time Machine backup has been running since 7:35am (about 2-1/2 hours so far). Hard to do hourly backups when each backup takes about 5 hours. I'd hate to see this thing when I'm actually here and doing stuff.
What's the deal with it being so slow? I wasn't doing anything over the weekend (it is my work desktop) and I'm using an Apple-shipped internal 750GB hard drive.
"backupd" cpu usage varies, as expected, but Finder is using between 25% and 80% cpu at any given time. And I'm not doing anything except running iostat in a terminal window. (I'm typing this on a 10.4.10 MBP.)
I did "sudo ls -R <diskname> | wc -l" on my main OSX disk in the most recent completed Time Machine backup directory and it counted 1845424 lines. I have a particular gmail account being IMAP accessed via mail.app (fedora mailing list) and, since that is all I use that gmail account for, all of the email is in one label which corresponds to one folder at the IMAP layer. There's a pretty good amount of traffic on that list and currently I have just under 100,000 emails in that folder. Because there are new emails (and thus new files) in that IMAP folder on my Mac, TM must hard-link each individual pre-existing email file plus add the new ones. So, each time TM runs, it must hard-link almost 100 thousand files in that one directory alone.
It doesn't seem that TM is meant to handle high loads or high volumes of data like this, at least on the current HFS+. It is possible that the ZFS would handle it better but that's currently not an option.
Some may respond that I either shouldn't connect my mail.app to a gmail account set up as such, or that I shouldn't expect TM to handle something like this. But this is exactly the kind of setup that TM should be able to handle.
In the meantime, it looks like TM is going to be slow. (oh, look; it is about 10:38am and TM is now saying "finishing backup" after running for 3 hours. and I "quit" mail.app to give it a break.)

Time Machine just killed two external HD

Hi All,
Time Machine (TM) just killed two external hard disk drives. I am running 10.8.3 on a MPB 2.3 GHz I7 with 16GB SDRAM and I have had problems with TM not recognizing the external hard disks. I purchased a new 2TB firewire HD and started TM and about 2 hours into the backup TM error out with an error and the disk no longer is recognized and can't be initialized using the disk utility as it says there are zero bytes available.
I reconnected my MBP to the original MT HD and it proceeded to do the same thing and the HD is no longer recognized and can't be initialized...
Anyone else seen this or have a clue how to fix it?

Open Disk Utility and select the disk device (not the volume name). Then click the Partition tab that appears, and use the drop-down menu to create "1 Partition." Then click the Options button and ensure "GUID" is used, and then select the Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) format and apply the changes.
When finished, set up Time Machine again and see if the problem persists. If so, then the issue is likely with the drive.
If it does happen again, are you able to select the drive in Disk Utility and perform a verification on it? If so, then are you able to see any errors? Do this by selecting the drive itself, as well as any volumes on it.

Time Machine Slow Backup

I use Time Machine to backup to a G-Technologies 4TB external HD. The backup is extremely slow, many times saying it will take 69,000 days to back up. I have almost a TB to backup. The G-Technology HD will go off line. I'm not sure if this is a HD problem or Time Machine problem. My iMac is a IntelMac with 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB of Ram, OSX 10.8.2. Any thoughts?

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes) in the String Matching text field. You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard." Note the timestamp of the last such message. Clear the text field and scroll back in the log to that time. Select the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear. Copy them (command-C) to the Clipboard. Paste (command-V) into a reply to this message.
If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don't post many repetitions of the same message.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — anonymize before posting.

Time Machine slowing to snail pace, md root, mdworker, backupd spikes

Running a fresh time machine backup, in this case a 480GB from MBPro to cleanly formatted 1TB Time Capsule over 1GBe, backup commences at a decent (though still too slow) clip of about 40GB an hour, then slows to a painful drip at 430GB complete when I rechecked in the morning.
Looked at apps and processes, seeing 99% cpu usage spikes varying across mds root, mdworker and backupd. When they back off, transfer picks up, though still really slow compared to what it should be.
Guess is an imbalance in how Spotlight interfaces with Time Machine on indexing. I would expect a 30% CPU constant level during the Time Machine job to keep up on indexing during file transfer rather than a spikey machine slowing, backup stalling methodology which appears to be happening.
Open to ideas, its not a memory or process leak or thread runaway, since a restart of the machine and return to the backup solves nada. I have 2GB of RAM with 1GB free during the job. I closed all other main apps, nothing else is placing a burden on the machine.

Gregory Lynn wrote:
Found a decent summary of how TM works in OS 10.5 http://www.girr.org/mac_stuff/backups.html which shed a little light on the operation and where one would expect slow downs.
That's more than a bit outdated. It refers to 10.5.1, the very early version.
See #D2 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
One cause of apparently slow backups is actually extra-large backups. If yours seem too large for the amount you've done between backups, see #D4 there.
And you might want to browse Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

Entering Time Machine - slow after update to Snow Leopard

Entering Time Machine via the icon in my top menu bar has never been fast. However, last week I moved from Leopard to Snow Leopard (since fully updated). Tonight I needed to restore a file from yesterday's backup, so I selected "Enter Time Machine." The "universe" with the timeline along the right loaded, but several minutes passed and I was still not able to use the arrows at the lower right to move backwards in time. Nor would the timeline at the right show any date markers other than "Now," "Today," and "January 2010" and "January 2009." I let it sit for several minutes with no apparent progress. Even the "cancel" button took nearly 60 seconds to function.
As an alternative, I tried running the Time Machine application from my apps folder. It was slower to bring up the "universe" but did, after a couple of minutes, get me to a window with a functional timeline.
Any idea what the problem might be? I feel like entry into my Time Capsule has gotten slower and slower, but tonight was really egregious.

It does take a while over a network; there's a lot of "setup" that seems to be required.
You might try the things in #E4 of [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

Back up time duration - time machine slow

I have a newish mbp. I have about 270 gig on it ot 750 gig drive.
My Time machine bacup stalled and after researching it was suggest to clear the backup drive totally and start again.
This i did.
Backing up to G Tech 2 TB drive via firewire 800.
Have been going for 24 hour and its done 17 gig. Is this slow? says 11 days to complete. Seems like it to me.
How can I speed it up?

Apple bombed on the last lion upgrade.. did you install the supplement to fix slow TM.
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1599

Time Machine slower since Lion?

I don't know if any of you have noticed as well, but since Lion my TM on my MBP is WAY slower than before. I mean it's taking more than 10 minutes to clean up after a 50MB backup...
During this time kernel task and mds are taking up about half the CPU.
Before you should ask, the Lion migration took place more than a week ago, it HAS finished indexing... ;-)
Any thoughts?

I had the same issue.
I use an external USB hard drive for time machine and had backups from Snow Leopard stretching back about four or five months. After upgrading to 10.7 it seemed as if time machine kept reindexing and reading the entire contents of my disk before and after every backup. It would take several minutes for the copying to even start and finishing off the backup would also take up to five or even ten minutes for relatively small data sets of around 50-100 MB.
As an experiment I made sure that all my data was safely backed up on another drive, repartitioned the USB drive and started over with a fresh time machine partition. Now backups are just as fast as they used to be. Might be something with my previous configuration that confused time machine into making deep scans or reindexing after making a restore point...

Time Machine slows down Lion?

I'm using the new Mac Mini with 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7 and 4GB 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM, and I connected a Porsche Design 2TB external drive to use as my Time Machine backup drive (it's one of the drives "supported" in the Apple online store). Now that Time Machine is running, it seems like every time I open a file it takes MUCH longer than it usually should to begin working. For example, even when I open a simple TextEdit file, there is a pause, I hear the whirr of the Porsche drive, and about 5-6 seconds later, the TextEdit file opens.
It's like the Time Machine has to spring into action for every little process or keystroke on my machine to be executed. It's really awful because I usually keep a pretty rigorous degree of workflow on my machine and run dual 22-inch screens with many windows and spreadsheets open simultaneously. An extra 5-6 seconds for every action really adds up when that happens 75-100 times per day.
Is anyone else having this issue or know how to mitigate it? Thanks!

A number of things can cause slow backups. See #D2 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
Time Machine won't even try to back up an open file. Most apps don't do that, anyway -- when you want to edit a file, the app makes a copy in memory, then replaces the one on disk when you Save it.

Time Machine slow, pegs CPU

So I have been using TM since install and it has been painfully slow and causes other applications to lag and pause.
So, after searching out info, I took a known suggestion and remade the TM disk so that it had the GUID partition map rather than the Apple Partition Map and started over. Initial backup was actually pretty fast, maybe 3 hours for 84GB. So my hopes were high. But…it's still slow as molasses and ramps up to whatever free CPU % is available, almost always is the top user of CPU%.
Now, a 2.8MB hourly backup has taken 45 minutes, stuck somewhere about 2.4 MB for the last 25 minutes. I almost never get hourly backups cause the small incremental backups take so long.
Anyone have any suggestions here?
FYI TM is on a FW 400 disk w/Oxford chip, same size as my internal and has plenty free space still.

problem solved see below.
The simple solution for me was to restore the whole system from Time Machine.
Here's how.
Make sure you copy all the stuff that you haven't backed up manually to a spare drive.
This fix will restore everything including 10.7.4 and wipe out all unbacked up data.
Hold command R down and reboot with your time machine drive connected.
You'll then have a few options to restore, so select time machine, find the file in the list that is prior to 10.7.5 (it shows this in the listing)
Hit restore and depending on how much data, there will be an estimated time displayed. In my case about 45 minutes.
Spotlight is now fine and re-indexing within Minutes
Time Machine is back to normal and does not Hang.
I hope this is of help to someone if you're in a fix and as frustrated as I was.
Problem now solved till Apple do a better update.
if you don't fancy the restore option above here's how to disable spolight.
Key in the following.
sudo mdutil -a -i off
You will be prompted to enter your admin password.
Hit return spotlight will stop.
If you want to enable it again, return to Terminal and type:
sudo mdutil -a -i on
You will be prompted to enter your admin password.
Hit return spotlight will start.

Time machine slow at everything (not only copying ...)

Hi,
Though i loved the concept, on a day to day basis, i find time machine almost unusable.
I am up to trash this thing and never retry it ... but may be its me who is stupid but not Time Machine ?
Whats happening:
* Time machine is definitely quite slow to back up
* But more than that, time machine is super slow to initialize a back up or close the job after a back up
It can some time stay 10' to look at what should be back up, and then 10 (or definitely more ...) minutes to close and clean the job (though the back up is finished). This even if it was even not a Mb to copy ! And you go no estimated time, you just wait ... arg ....
This is extremly frustrating, i have the impression my computer is constantly interrupted, this prevent me from using correctly the Net as network is totally dead ... just unsable !
Though my configuration is very standard:
* Standard 1 Tb time capsule
* Standard OSX.6 on a macbookpro
* Approximately 120 Gb of data but no specific use ....
This is vey deceptive. I think i'll go back to Carbon Copy cloner and wait for the apple engineers to put more effort into time machine ... except if someone raise my ignorance ? Anything i could do wrong ?

luro wrote:
Thank you. It might be this spotlight thing then (strange that spotlight would index TC in a standard default setup though).
No, many folks want to use it to find backup copies of things they've deleted.
I removed it and hopefully this will improve the situation.
Don't stop there. By all means exclude it from anti-virus, and try the other things, too.
Your description sounds like there may be more going on than that. Get the +TM Buddy+ (per #A1) and see if TM's having trouble deleting old backups. If so, the +*Repair Disk+* may be called for.

Time Machine Slow - Snow Leopard

I have been using time machine for almost a year with no problems, but today it started taking forever to back up. There is plenty of space on the external drive, but after about 5 minutes it has only backed up 21 KB out of 79GB!
I used disk utility on my external my mac drive and it said everything was okay.
Does anyone know why it could be doing this?

It does take a while over a network; there's a lot of "setup" that seems to be required.
You might try the things in #E4 of [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

Time Machine slow to backup files after System Update to Mac OS X 10.7.3

I downloaded and successfully installed the latest update to Mac OS X Lion (10.7.3) a couple of days ago, and since then I have been having problems backing up my files using Time Machine.
My external hard drive is connected via USB, and I have tried replacing the cables but this has no effect. I have tried restarting the laptop several times, unplugging the hard drive and pretty much anything else I can think off, but it still takes a long time to back up.
For example, I left it running for half an hour - when I came back it had only backed up 1KB! It would usually have completed an entire backup in this time.
I have been patient and waited several hours and tried backing up several times.
Any suggestions would be greatly apprectiated.
Thank you.

Try the things in the green box in #D2 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

Time Machine Slow? Kill Norton AntiVirus

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