Cannot finish the backup before my journey begins. Since ist started two days back, it is now at 35%. What a ..
This happens on my MacBook Pro with current macOS Sequoia 15.5.
I've been trying with two different external USB hard drives, including a brand new one.
Come on, Apple.
[Edited by Moderator]
Original Title: Time Machine backup takes days!!!
MacBook Pro 16″
Not just TM, the OS needs that at all times, they should make it more well known that free space is not ours alone, nor free… also if you could run it with 8 GB FREE the SSD would die 4 times faster than with 32 FREE.
Update:
Yesterday I freed some space on my systen, which now 25 GB for free SSD space and 5 GB of free RAM.
I had to retry the backup after my external target disk had to be disconnected (I'm meanwhile travelling).
Still the backup process takes WAY TOO LONG.
Its initial estimation for remaining hours was 2 hours, which would have been perfectly okay.
Yet it quickly started increasing - after about an hour it said 6 hours.
Now, some 6 hours later, where it claims to have reached 50%, it tells me 8 hours.
dvo777 wrote:
Update:
Yesterday I freed some space on my systen, which now 25 GB for free SSD space and 5 GB of free RAM.
You said you has 512 GB SSD. So now you have 5% free space on the SSD. That's far below the recommended 15%-20% so you will continue to see slowdown and problems. Also, Time Machine uses some space on your internal SSD as a "staging ground" for some of its processes; it isn't just straight out copying files (which requires little free space), it is setting things up so you can recover files from Time Machine from different dates so it is more complicated than just copying files.
There may be more than one thing wrong here, but it will be impossible to troubleshoot the Time Machine slowness until you have about 15%-20% free space, which is most accurately gauged by open Disk Utility and examining your internal drive.
The claim that the reason for the bad backup performance being litte free system SSD space is empirically wrong.
As I wrote, my system now has some 25 GB free space, which is 3 times the original amout,
but this did not change the exteremely bad performance at all!
The reason is clearly something different.
Taking little SSD space as a cheap excuse for unacceptably loooooog duration of a full TM backup does not work out.
It is misleading and just proves little technical clue about the acutal issue.
Apparently you did not get what I meant with the analogy I wrote above:
With this, I wannted to point out a different issue (apart from is painfully bad performance),
namely that its estimations on how long the full backup is going to take goes entirely wrong!
Which is another indication of poor software quality of the Time Machine backup.
Trying out an alternative backup solution for comparison is good.
I had already done so, in order to get at least some full backup in reasonable time.
I've simply used `rsync -ax`. It works about 4-5 times faster than Time Machine.
This makes no sense.
The (initial) backup is just painfully - and needlessly - slow.
There is no good reason for it to take more than a couple of hours at most.
BTW, when a backup is interrupted, it can not get resumed later.
Which also indicates bad design and major waste of disk space.
Is that 512GB or 512GB free space?
8 GB free is not enough, but really, you need, 30GB MINIMUM free space.
What a waste of resources.
And the backup process does not warn about its space greediness and its terrible performance when not granted that much space.
Amen to that
How would your boss react if, for a clearly defined task you started to do, each time he asks you how much time you still need to complete it, you keep increasing the estimate?
BDAqua wrote:
+1 for GC.
Thx
More than one way to achieve the desired results of backing up
Unable to finish Time Machine back up on macOS Sequoia
