I am backing up my hdd with the Time machine. Even small incremental backups take several hours. For an hour or so I am in the state "50.3 MB of 496.3MB", while in Activity Monitor I notice that mds_stores has accumulated already over 116 GB data read, and it increases by about 50 MB/s. My Hdd is this new pcie-sdd type, so it should be efficient with this sort of backup.
Moreover in Console it is written that about 2300 files constitute this 0.5 GB of backup.
I am backing up to external usb Toshiba drive.
Am I missing something obvious? This is not normal, is it? Can I see which of these 2300 files the Time machine is currently backing up? The "preparing" phase was not so long – took about 30 minutes.
Best Answer
I was having the same problem pretty regularly. I tried the usual tricks (stop backup, eject, mount, delete
.inProgress
files, stopping spotlight, changing the throttle priority (sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0
). Sometimes, this works. Other times it doesn't and it keeps crawling along at a few MB per hour.One additional trick, that works more frequently, is to force quit the
backupd
process directly from the Disk tab ofActivity Monitor
. Then tell it to start backup. This usually works for me. Heads up: this may be a terrible idea in other ways (e.g. maybe it could damage existing backups). In my experience, it hasn't so far.