Mac – What does deliver higher transfer speed for Timemachine backup to ubuntu? NFS or AppleTalk (netatalk)

On El Capitan to High Sierra OS - the io is throttled in some cases. You can review these steps in case they apply in your case. Not everyone sees this speed up, but it shouldn’t be hard to test and reverse if it doesn’t help you. Anyone on Mojave and newer should look to other fixes like testing a backup to a blank or erased drive.

Time Machine ridiculously slow after El Capitan upgrade

The throttle should be evident in observing the backupd usage of the filesystem:

sudo fs_usage backupd

Writing a command to /etc/sysctl.conf and then restarting should disable that throttle:

echo 'debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf

Or without restarting:

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

You'll want to watch for other performance issues (extra CPU usage, other IO slowing, increased energy usage when backing up) after making that low level system tuning adjustment.

CrashPlan and TimeMachine have been very helpful for almost all the situations I've seen where one copy isn't enough.

Crash Plan software is very good - watch your java CPU usage until you're comfortable things are running smoothly in incremental mode, but it's as good as any of the other software that's out these days. The software will run on both the sending and the receiving computer elsewhere on your campus/building.

You can of course back up to your offsite storage but once you've got it to the other computer, tapes, off site drive cloning and other non-bandwidth consuming options can work well.

Just watch Java CPU usage when you have large file changes - you can throttle things if needed, but it's pretty self-sufficient with the out of the box settings.