Why does time capsule take so long

The disk that has 10, files will take longer to back up than the drive with 1, files assuming that they take up the same space in both cases. The Time Machine app was designed to work on the background. The idea is that if the Time Machine is set to run automatically, the last thing you want it to use a lot of CPU while you are working on something important.

So, by default, the backup process is a low priority one, and it should remain so. However, if you are planning to do something disruptive, such as installing a new macOS or do experiments as I do — sometimes I install apps with viruses to see their impact and then report the results on my site. Naturally, I want to change the default behavior and push the backup app to the foreground at the expense of other processes on Mac. As we already know, the Time Machine process, by default, is a low priority process.

And macOS treat such process differently than regular processes. It artificially throttles them in order to give other high priority process more CPU time. With this approach, you can play your game or watch a Youtube video in the browser without interruptions from system background processes.

But since our goal was temporarily to speed up Time Machine backup, we can use a little trick that overrides the default macOS behavior. The command requires entering an admin password. According to some people, the backup time reduces significantly, and in some cases, users reported the reduction from 11 hours to 55 minutes.

I believe that it really depends on the size of the backup. The bigger the size, the bigger is the improvement. Caveats: This command is system-wide. It means the change will apply to all system processes. So, if you have other background processes that run with a low priority, they will suddenly start taking more CPU.

Clair Software. The app is not free, however. In macOS, it is possible to set the task priority higher or lower. With nice command, you set the initial priority, with renice you change it for the currently running process. So, now we can change niceness and adjust priority higher or lower.

The acceptable range of values is from to Since we want to increase the priority, we will set the value to the lower the value, the higher is priority. There was an app called ProcessRenicer from eosgarden , which could do it in a visual way without having using the Terminal app. Unfortunately, the app is not being maintained anymore. So, I am not sure if you can make it work on the latest macOS versions.

However, if you still on older OS X versions, it might work for you just fine. Both approaches described above have some limitations. You may be willing to disable the throttling if it means your backup will be completed more quickly.

As a result, you would expect the backup to be much faster. The special terminal command reduced the time to just an hour. He concluded that this method should make your backup at least ten times faster. Open the Terminal app. Next, you need to enter the following command into the app. Either type it carefully or copy and paste it. Then press Enter. Type it, then press Enter. A slightly cryptic message will be displayed, indicating that throttling is now off. Turning the throttle off should drastically change your user experience.

Your Mac will feel sluggish when backups are performed. That will happen automatically next time you restart your computer. Or you can do it manually with the Terminal. Type the same command, this time ending it with the number 1 instead of 0, which indicates you want to turn it on rather than off:. Reality check: I wanted to see if I could confirm these results and get a sense of how much faster copying files would be on my Macs.

So I copied files of various sizes on two different machines, one running Catalina, the other running Big Sur beta. I used a stopwatch to time each operation, then compared the throttled speed with the unthrottled.

Sometimes the unthrottled backups were just two seconds faster; other times, they were the same speed. One result was surprising: when copying a 4. I was curious and decided to keep testing. I turned off throttling and backed up once more. It was slower again, taking three hours. It may be that something has changed on recent macOS versions so that this method no longer works. I searched for more user experiences online and found reports of this trick not working up to two years ago.

Your email address will not be published. However, there are times when you will want to minimize the time required by a backup. Make the Backup Smaller The more data you need to back up, the longer it will take. Here are some examples: Your Downloads folder. You may want to exclude this folder if you tend to leave everything in your downloads folder. After all, everything there can be downloaded again from the internet.

I currently have over 12 GB in mine. Virtual machines. If you use virtualization software like Parallels or VMWare Fusion , the software will create huge virtual machines within single files. These files are often gigabytes in size. For us, Time Machine waiting to complete its first backup only took around 10 minutes for a 10 GB backup.

For computers with a lot of apps, files, or other info, preparing first-time backup and even follow-up backups may take a while. If Time Machine progress bar stops displaying any progress for over 30 minutes, that means your backup is likely stuck.

Additionally, if you are backing up via a network, check your connection as spotty Wi-Fi might prevent your Time Machine from running properly. If your Time Machine is stuck in the Preparing backup stage, you will have to stop it and start over. Press the X next to Preparing backup progress bar and wait until the progress bar and Preparing backup disappear.

You can also scan your Mac, as well as the external drive you are trying to use, for malware. Just to be extra sure, you can even try erasing the external drive with Disk Utility although Time Machine erases everything on your drive when preparing the backup, so this step may very well be an overkill. Since an antivirus can use your external hard drive for routine checkups, it might interfere with the Time Machine backup. This means another solution you can try is excluding the external drive volume from your antivirus scans after you scan the drive for malware though.

Another reason for Time Machine issues can be that your macOS is not up to date. Should there be any updates available, go ahead and install them before attempting to create another Time Machine backup.

If you have previously successfully created a Time Machine backup on the external disk you are using, but have issues now, recent software installs might be interfering with the backup. Other apps trying to use your external drive as Time Machine is creating a backup could result in a conflict, so make sure no apps are using the drive.

All in all, you Time Machine should not be preparing the backup for hours, so hopefully one of the above solutions can help you. One option is Get Backup Pro. The app allows you to select individual items you want to backup, sync folders, and schedule backups. You can backup your info both on your Macintosh HD and external drives. And if you need a sync across your devices, ChronoSync is the solution for you.

Set up the folders you need syncing and hit the large arrow icon right in the middle of your sync setup:.