Time machine takes forever on initial backup, progress bar randomly resets

Question

When I first tried to run Time Machine I was sure that it would be simple, as Apple Software generally is. I was warned by another user that the first backup might take a while, so I began the backup on a Friday night (the day my crispy new external 320GB Seagate drive arrived). When I went to bed it was on around 24GB of approx 65GB of data. When I got up the next morning, it had only backed up 27GB!
Another problem I had a couple of times was after the backup had been going for 3-4 hours it would reset itself and start all over again! In other words the progress bar got 50% of the way through and then went back to 0%. This was obviously extremely annoying, and prompted me to stop the process, reformat the backup drive and search for some more answers in the internet.
After a full Saturday of fluffing around, calling my friend who has Time Machine working OK and watching the little blue bar creep along at speeds like 1.5MB/s (according to activity monitor) I finally managed to get it to work!
I've summarised what I did below:
_Formatting your Time Machine drive_
In the Disk Utility, select the drive and choose “Partition”
Press the “Options…” button.
Use "Apple Partition Map" partition scheme if the disk will be used with Time Machine and a PowerPC-based Mac.
Use "GUID" partition scheme if the disk will be used with Time Machine and a Intel-based Mac.
The following links are worth a look:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1550
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/apple/leopard-disk-utility-format-issue-screws-with-t ime-machine-but-theres-an-easy-fix-316573.php
_Spotlight may interfere_
Turn off indexing for Spotlight on the Time Machine drive
In the Spotlight control panel
Click the privacy button
Click the + button and choose your Time Machine backup drive
This will mean that Spotlight will not try to index the drive while the backup is happening.
_Excluding files_
In the Time Machine Control Panel
Click Options…
Do not back up:
Press the + button and choose the system folder
Choose “Excluded all system files “ in the dialogue box that comes up.
See the following link for more info on this step:
http://www.macinstruct.com/node/234
I’ve also heard that *turning off 3rd party antivirus software* may also help (if you have any – I don’t)
_The following links may also be helpful:_
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306681
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1209412

Answer 1

Are you running it over wireless or ethernet?
We particularly advise initial backup to be done over ethernet otherwise the job has this tendency not to finish. The fact is wireless has errors.. and error correction doesn't work very well during the initial copying.. TM does a verify of the backup once it finishes.. I think this is the 5sec mark.. and keeps building as it discovers files that don't match. It can also be spotlight indexing.  What it is doing is good.. doing it over wireless is very bad. It has to read both sides.. then compare then decide if there is a corruption to copy the file again.. then compare again.
It can also be a file is actually corrupt on the source disk.
My inclination is to kill it. Even if you have to restart from scratch.. over ethernet it copies at about 60GB an hour.. it should complete overnight with hours to spare.
Do a verify of the source disk before you start. And load in widget to get actual log messages from TM.
See A1 http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Pondini also has some stuff about backups taking far too long.
See D section in reference above.. also how to cancel a TM backup. (other than turn it off).