Time machine spends too much time backing up

Even when I have very little changed information to back up - say 15MB - time machine takes 10-15 minutes.   Every hour.   It spends like 3-4 minutes "Setting up", another 5-8 minutes "Backing up XXX of 15.2MB", and then another 3-5 minutes "cleaning up".
Syncing or backing up changed data on the same drive takes Synchronize! X Plus barely over a minute. Maybe a 1 minute compare time and then 10s of file copying, then done.   Why is TM so much slower?
Since I can't change how often TM runs (that's really annoying, BTW, Apple), this means that almost 25% of the time my mac is disk-bound and slow. Extremely frustrating to work on.   I often end up working on my 3-year-old macbook pro because it doesn't have to deal with TM (I just sync it to the desktop every couple of days with Synchronize! X Plus) and so in practice it's a whole lot faster to work with than the mighty 2.66 Ghz Quad-Core Xeon Mac Pro with 8GB RAM.
I don't think it's anything wrong with the TM disk.   I've observed this kind of behavior on every mac I've used with TM in the last four years - at least three different macs and at least nine different external drives.
Why on Earth does TM take geological time to back up my mac every hour?    I know it has some comparisons to do, but copying those files should only take a few seconds.     Does it behave this way for everyone, or am I just unlucky?

this means that almost 25% of the time my mac is disk-bound and slow.
I run Time machine on my server. It uses under 2 percent of CPU. I find that it works at low priority and does not interfere with other activities. I have not observed any substantial slowdown due to disk access or any other reason.
know it has some comparisons to do, but copying those files should only take a few seconds.
If you want it locked up so hard that you cannot even type, it probably could copy those files in a few seconds. It is intended to do its work in the background, and allow you to continue to do other work.
Since I can't change how often TM runs...
Oh yes, you can. Apple did not give access to those parameters directly, but those settings and others are in several .plist files and can be changed with third-party utilities.
What computer are you backing up, and how much memory is installed?
Are you ever seeing any Pageouts on the Activity Monitor Memory display?
Are you backing up directly to a local disk, over Wireless, or over Ethernet, and at what speed?
Is the disk that contains the Time Machine backup files used for any other purpose?
Have you ever made changes to the Time Machine disk using the Finder?

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My high school aged child is spending too much time on Facebook, Tumblr to the detriment of home work. Is there any way I can limit the access to these sites to between 8pm and 10pm?

My high school aged child is spending too much time on Facebook and Tumblr is there any way I can limit the access time on these sites to from 8pm to 10pm?

System Preferences>Parental Controls has time limits - check out this intro to Parental Controls from Cult of Mac on YouTube.
Clinton

Time Machine deleting too many old back-ups

I connect Time Machine (external drive) and start the back-up. TM takes a while to clean old back-ups to create space. Fair enough, as I have not been backing up since a month ago. This takes too long though, I get suspicious and I check Console and see that TM has deleted 5 old back-ups. It does not make any sense, I know that deleting one, at most two, would have been enough. I check the Console log and see the text below:
1/10/15 10:19:33.109 PM com.apple.backupd[415] Deleted backup /Volumes/LaCie/Backups.backupdb/John Doe’s MacBook Pro/2013-09-29-211629 containing 1.76 GB; 140.71 GB now available, 194.75 GB required
This is curious as I am sure a single TM back-up is much larger than that, at least 130GB. I get into TM via Finder and notice that each back-up for a given date has the expected size there, with all the many files from my laptop correctly saved in the back-up. And yet, when TM deletes a given back-up, it frees up only much less in terms of space and so it keeps deleting back-ups.
I have had some issues in the past with this external drive and I recently had it fixed. I have another one and I plan to switch to it as TM. Yet, I do not understand why this happens.
Macbook Pro OS X 10.9.5, 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Time Machine External Drive: La Cie Porsche 500GB

140.71 GB now available, 194.75 GB required
It appears Time Machine needs 194.75 GB to do the latest backup, but only 140.71 is available. So it keeps deleting more in an attempt to make enough space available.

After System Restore Time Machine does too much!

I had some issues with boot camp that I will not go into now. Haha. After reinstalling Leopard and using my previous time machine backup stuff to resort to, my computer is fine. It's just like the way I left it the last time i did a backup. However, when I went to do a current back up, it has to back up like 100 GB of stuff which makes no sense, I have done nothing new. I think it's backing up the same stuff that it already has. Somehow after the system restore it can't tell that it already backed up everything that's on my computer. Any suggestions!? Thanks.

Is there anything I can do so that I don't have to waste so much space with the same stuff?

Time machine backups too much

I recently started using time machine, backing up automatically wireless to timecapsule(1TB). I noticed that every hour, time machine is backing up approximately 20GB (while i only use 100GB in total of a 250hard drive). is it possible it has something to do with running Windows in VMwarefusion at the time the system is backing up? why would time machine make such huge backups and how do i prevent that from happening?

Thomas is entirely, 100%, correct.
Besides taking up a huge amount of space, Time Machine will sometimes choke on those VM files (as it's one monster file to OSX).
If you want, you can delete all the backups of it, per #12 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.

Time machine makes too many full back-ups

Yes, this has been written about ad nauseam almost since Time Machine's been around. But I am really tired of going through 3 and 4 TB hard drives because of a Time Machine bug/error/glitch/what-have-you. The latest message (from the Time Machine Buddy widget) is this:
Deep event scan at path:/Volumes/LaCie reason:must scan subdirs|new event db|
Why? Nothing's changed with this drive. Nothing's changed with the Time Machine Drive.
Thanks in advance for intelligent help.
James

Thanks for the quick reply Eric.
Yeah, I'm certainly aware of these pages. I'm running Mavericks, and there is nothing after 10.8 listed in the otherwise comprehensive resource. But more to my issue, there was only a small bit (D3) that I could find about doing full backups, none of which applied to my situation. Basically I'm wondering why there is a "new" event data base.
Same drive
not many, if any new files (it's an external sound library storage drive),
Weeks went by with none of these issues
but I have noticed issues when waking from sleep
I'm not aware of any potential issues with the Mac's routine maintenance operations. But again, it's an external drive (via FW)
The 2nd link did not work.

Time Machine spending a LONG time Preparing Backup

I've upgraded to MAverick nd everything seems to be working. However time machine has spent the past 24 hours saying that it's prep[aring the backup. Part of this time it changed the messaged to say deleting old backups....
Then it says backup failed..
Any suggestions on what is happening?
I'm tempted to wipe the time achine drive and start from scratch but thought that I'd ask you good folks first.
Thanks!

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 that corresponds to an abnormal backup. Now
CLEAR THE WORD "Starting" FROM THE TEXT FIELD
so that all messages are showning, and scroll back in the log to the time you noted. 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 to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste (command-V) into a reply to this message.
If all you see are messages that contain the word "Starting," you didn't clear the text field.
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.

Anyone else spending too much time DEBUGGING the tutorial?

Just a thought. Spending more time working through the fixes than learning J2EE.

I second that. What part of the Tutorial is holding you up?
-Ian Evans

Cursor spending too much time cloning

I am profiling the performance of scanning through a database using a cursor. The breakdown looks something like this:
Total - 3800 ms
IN.fetchTarget - 1250 ms
IN.latch - 300 ms
Cursor.beginMoveCursor - 1260 ms
Cursor.endMoveCursor - 920 ms
Most of the time in begin and end move cursor is dealing with cloning. So effectively it is taking more time to deal with the cursor than to retrieve the data from disk. That doesn't sound right. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way to not clone the cursor?
Instead of using the cursor if I use get for each element the time is comparable. Here is the breakdown
Total - 4800 ms
IN.fetchTarget - 1250 ms
Tree.search - 940 ms
Cursor.init - 1380 ms (almost all the time incrementing an atomic integer)
Cursor.close - 830 ms
Cursor.lockLN - 300 ms
I was hoping that by using the cursor I will cut down most of the overhead (search, repeated cursor init and close) and the time will come down to close to 1250 ms.

I strongly suggest that rather than doing profiling, you look at your app throughput (without -ea or a profiler running), and look at the EnvironmentStats. The stats tell you what is going on in JE, and tuning based on the stats is normally the most fruitful. Looking at things in a profiler may help to optimize JE code itself, but is less likely to be fruitful for tuning your app, and a profiler is usually more beneficial after you have tuned the app, based on looking at the stats.
--mark

Virtual machine take too much time to start on vmware

hi ,
i have install Windows 2003 enterprise and SOLMAN on vmware with 3 gb of ram assign to the virtual machine .
when i start the virtual machine it takes 15 to 20 min to start . can any one tell me the solution for this .
thanks in advance.

Well I tried the same thing. But unfortunately I did a corrupted installation.
But I assigned 12GB of virtual memory for the VMWARE WIN 2003 SERV OS and I installed it on WIN 7 32 BIT HOME PREMIUM and set the virtual memory to 15GB and assigned 2 CPUS.
The main problem you are facing is maybe because of you forgot to install VMWARE tools or had a corrupted installation. I had the same problem. Also try to keep the screen resolution to a minimum of 800*600. I suggest you to reinstall the VMware tools once again and give it a shot.
Just wanted to add that I reinstalled successfully and its running really good.
Hope this helps and good luck
Anirban
Edited by: santra.anirban on Sep 20, 2010 2:18 PM

MacBook spends too much time loading

Whether its the internet loading advertisements (videos or inter-actives), or opening larger applications, my macbook always seems to freeze up, either for a few seconds or minutes to unexpectedly quitting the program. Does anyone know if this strictly has to do with RAM, or maybe cookies?

Have you repaired permissions?: Repair Permissions
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1452
How much free space do you have on your Hard Drive.
What OS are you running?
How much Ram do you have?
Have you tried running any maintenance programs, such as Onyx?

HT201250 my time capsule is taking too much time indexing backup and then taking longer time to back up ( 207 days ) or longer !!! what shall i do ?

my time capsule is taking too much time indexing backup and then taking longer time to back up ( 207 days ) or longer !!! what shall i do ?

Try 10.7.5 supplemental update.
This update seems to have solved this problem for many.
Best.

Time Machine spends hours partially backing up and then fails with "Time Machine couldn't complete the backup due to a network problem." Tried suggestions I've seen on the forum.

Time Machine spends hours partially backing up and then fails with "Time Machine couldn't complete the backup due to a network problem." I've tried various suggestions I've seen on the forum but nothing has worked. TIme Machine worked fine for the last two years and just suddenly started having this problem every time. The only thing that was a little different is that the computer was off for a week while on vacation and then I added a large amount (20 GB) of photos. Now the requested backup size is 82GB, which is large, and process proceeds very slowly for 2-3 hours before failing with the message mentioned. I have more than enough available backup storage space for it. Before failing, Time Machine has backed up no more than 12GB or so of the backup. It fails during different files each time.
I've turned off the computer sleep feature, and I've checked that the NAS is set to never automatically power down. I normally backup over Wi-Fi, but I've also tried connecting to Ethernet and it still has the same problem. It's odd because I also have a MacBook Pro that is still backing up fine to the same NAS using the MacBook's Time Machine.
I am using an iMac with OS X 10.6.8 and an Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 NAS.
I have system logs that I can share if helpful. The logged messages vary a bit from run to run, but here are some messages that I've been seeing:
I always get this message near the beginning of the backup:
Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Macintosh HD
I've gotten this messsage a number of times:
Bulk setting Spotlight attributes failed.
One Day
Stopping backupd to allow ejection of backup destination disk!
Another day
1/7/12 10:44:20 AM
mDNSResponder[18]
PenaltyTimeForServer: PenaltyTime negative -112916, (server penaltyTime -1132397006, timenow -1132284090) resetting the penalty
1/7/12 10:46:37 AM
kernel
ASP_TCP Disconnect: triggering reconnect by bumping reconnTrigger from curr value 0 on so 0x1106be94
1/7/12 10:46:37 AM
kernel
AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect started /Volumes/TimeMachine prevTrigger 0 currTrigger 1
Another Day
1/6/12 8:03:22 AM
Google Chrome[164]
Cannot find function pointer CMPluginInFactory for factory 3487BB5A-3E66-11D5-A64E-003065B300BC in CFBundle/CFPlugIn 0x16f99e20 </Users/smarmer/Library/Contextual Menu Items/Google Notifier Quick Add CM Plugin.plugin> (not loaded)
1/6/12 8:04:02 AM
com.apple.backupd[193]
Copied 7.5 GB of 67.0 GB, 8866 of 8866 items
1/6/12 8:06:58 AM
/System/Library/CoreServices/CCacheServer.app/Contents/MacOS/CCacheServer[1013]
No valid tickets, timing out
1/6/12 8:29:44 AM
mDNSResponder[19]
PenaltyTimeForServer: PenaltyTime negative -148702, (server penaltyTime 2056822773, timenow 2056971475) resetting the penalty
1/6/12 8:59:22 AM
kernel
ASP_TCP Disconnect: triggering reconnect by bumping reconnTrigger from curr value 0 on so 0xa5ac380
1/6/12 8:59:22 AM
kernel
AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect started /Volumes/TimeMachine prevTrigger 0 currTrigger 1
1/6/12 8:59:22 AM
kernel
AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: doing reconnect on /Volumes/TimeMachine
1/6/12 8:59:22 AM
kernel
AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: soft mounted and hidden volume so do not notify KEA for /Volumes/TimeMachine
1/6/12 8:59:22 AM
kernel
AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: Max reconnect time: 30 secs, Connect timeout: 15 secs for /Volumes/TimeMachine
1/6/12 8:59:22 AM
kernel
AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: connect to the server /Volumes/TimeMachine
1/6/12 8:59:22 AM
kernel
ASP_TCP asp_SetTCPQoS: sock_settclassopt got error 57
Another day
1/5/12 3:48:55 PM
mdworker[2128]
CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon in dictionary.
1/5/12 4:24:54 PM
mDNSResponder[19]
PenaltyTimeForServer: PenaltyTime negative -42698, (server penaltyTime 1148718961, timenow 1148761659) resetting the penalty
1/5/12 4:29:58 PM
com.apple.backupd[2074]
Copied 586.4 MB of 67.0 GB, 9891 of 9891 items
1/5/12 4:39:00 PM
kernel
ASP_TCP Disconnect: triggering reconnect by bumping reconnTrigger from curr value 0 on so 0xa1c0380

bokon0n wrote:
1/11/12 8:53:30 AM
com.apple.backupd[1169]
Warning: Destination /Volumes/TimeMachine does not support TM Lock Stealing
1/11/12 8:53:30 AM
com.apple.backupd[1169]
Warning: Destination /Volumes/TimeMachine does not support Server Reply Cache
Those indicate that your NAS is not fully compatible with Snow Leopard.
1/11/12 8:53:35 AM
kernel
jnl: disk2s2: replay_journal: from: 67182592 to: 78680064 (joffset 0xa7b8000)
1/11/12 8:53:39 AM
kernel
jnl: disk2s2: examining extra transactions starting @ 78680064 / 0x4b09000
1/11/12 8:53:39 AM
kernel
jnl: disk2s2: Extra txn replay stopped @ 79056896 / 0x4b65000
1/11/12 8:53:49 AM
kernel
jnl: disk2s2: journal replay done.
1/11/12 8:53:49 AM
fseventsd[41]
event logs in /Volumes/Time Machine/.fseventsd out of sync with volume. destroying old logs. (253512 14 253512)
1/11/12 8:53:50 AM
kernel
hfs: Removed 1 orphaned / unlinked files and 0 directories
That looks like a problem was found with the file system (data) on the TM disk. I don't know the details, but OSX tried to recover it from the journal, and found extra data on the drive. Likely a result of the incompatibility mentioned above.
1/11/12 9:47:40 AM
com.apple.backupd[1169]
Bulk setting Spotlight attributes failed.
That's a problem writing to the NAS drive.
But the backup continued after all this.
1/11/12 1:25:07 PM
kernel
ASP_TCP Disconnect: triggering reconnect by bumping reconnTrigger from curr value 0 on so 0x9d00b44
Something caused a disconnect. Can't tell from the log what it was.
I doubt it's a problem with something in OSX being damaged or corrupted, but reinstalling OSX isn't a major hassle, so might be worth a try.
To be incompatible with Snow Leopard, this NAS must be at least a couple of years old. It may be beginning to fail.
Contact the maker. See if there's an update to make it compatible with Snow Leopard. If so, that might fix it.
If not, or if that doesn't fix it, see if they have any diagnostics that will shed any light.

HT201250 I want to use Time Machine to back up my pictures because my hard drive is full but I'm wondering if once I back up the pictures then delete them will time machine delete them off the back up too?

I want to use Time Machine to back up my pictures because my hard drive is full but I'm wondering if once I back up the pictures then delete them will time machine delete them off the back up too?

Evetually yes.
If your pictures have been in the same location (same folder, same subfolder, ...) for more than a week, then copies if them will remain in your TM backups until it fills up. They are then vulnerable to being deleted.
If they've been there for less than a week, TM could delete them as early as a month from now. If they've been there for only a few hours, chances are TM will delete them tomorrow.
This is why TM is not the best tool to use to archive data that you will be deleting from your main hard drive. Copy them to a dedicated external drive, or burn DVDs.

Backing Up Requires Too Much TIme

I have been messing around with iTunes for the past 6 hours. When I talked to an associate they encouraged me to download the new iTunes. In return I am currently having to wait hours for my iPod to be "Back uped." I found some helpful hints online and followed them - including deleting all my apps. Still, my iPod will not go past backing up. It makes me so mad that a process that should take no longer than 10 minutes has wasted almost 7 hours of my day. Apple needs to fix this problem IMMEDITELY.

richardfit wrote:
pc taking too long to boot, touchsmart loading on every boot up, taking way too much time
disable inside application, use msconfig, uninstall other applications, etc.... (as I try to replicate your grammar and style)

Time machine spends too much time backing up

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