Time Machine was and remains one of the best tools to backup Mac’s data. While the tool itself is straightforward and does not have manyoptions, at times, it is so frustrating to figure out why it misbehaves.
- What Files Does Time Machine Backup File
- Time Machine Backup
- What Files Does Time Machine Backup Time Machine
- What Files Does Time Machine Backup Files
- What Files Does Time Machine Backup
- What Files Does Time Machine Backup Software
If time machine backup is slow on your Mac and you arelooking for ways to improve the speed of the backup then this article is foryou.
Use Time Machine as Your Backup on Mac Apart from the iCloud service, Apple also offers a default backup option called the Time Machine. It works by providing backup to all your files like apps, photos, documents, system files, and more on your Mac. Time Machine backups is a powerful and useful feature every Apple users prefer to secure their personal and professional data. Being a developer, I regularly commit my code to BitBucket for backups and to safeguard personal files and memories; I use Time Machine backup every week. Each backup destination will contain a complete Time Machine backup, but automatic backups are made to only one of those destinations each hour, in rotation. Let’s say that your MacBook Pro is used in three locations, each with its own destination volume, named Vol1, Vol2, and Vol3. On the first hourly backup, Time Machine looks first for Vol1.
What Files Does Time Machine Backup File
How long it takes to do a Time Machine backup depends on thefollowing factors:
The Number of Files and Their Size on the Primary Storage
How long does time machine take to backup 500gb? With allfactors being the same, it is obvious that 500GB will take longer to back upthan 256GB. And it doesn’t matter how big the drive is. What matters is howmuch data the disk contains.
And it’s not just the size. The disk that has 10,000 fileswill take longer to back up than the drive with 1,000 files assuming that theytake up the same space in both cases.
The Priority of the Backup Process and How To Adjust It
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 lastthing you want it to use a lot of CPU while you are working on somethingimportant. So, by default, the backup process is a low priority one, and itshould remain so.
![What Files Does Time Machine Backup What Files Does Time Machine Backup](https://sweetcode.io/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/maxresdefault-990x557.jpg)
However, if you are planning to do something disruptive,such as installing a new macOS or do experiments as I do – sometimes I installapps with viruses to see their impact and then report the results on my site.In this case, I’d love to take a full backup immediately, and I don’t want towait for too long.
Unfortunately, the background nature of the Time Machinedoes not work in situations like this.
Naturally, I want to change the default behavior and pushthe backup app to the foreground at the expense of other processes on Mac.
I found two ways to change the Time Machine processpriority.
- Remove throttling for low priority processes
- Change the priority of the backup task
Remove throttling for low priority processes
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 Machinebackup, we can use a little trick that overrides the default macOS behavior.
The steps are the following:
1. Start Terminal app
2. Copy following text and paste into the Terminal window
The command requires entering an admin password. If youdon’t have a password enabled when logging in, you have to set it up in SystemReferences -> Users and Groups.
The command will take effect immediately.
3. Now open Time Machine and click the Backup Now button tostart the process.
4. After backup finishes don’t forget to change the setting backby running the same command with different parameter:
According to some people, the backup time reduces significantly, and in some cases, users reported the reduction from 11 hours to 55 minutes.
I tested the command myself, but I didn’t see that muchdifference. The improvement was around 20%. I believe that it really depends onthe 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.
That’s why either turn it off after backup is done bysetting the parameter to 1 or simply reboot the Mac.
User-friendly approach
If you don’t like to use Terminal, there is an app that calls command above for you. It’s called App Tamer by St. Clair Software. The app has a checkbox called “Accelerate Time Machine Backups”. The app is not free, however.
Change the priority of the backup task
Another way to change the priority of the backup processalso requires some Terminal magic.
In macOS, it is possible to set the task priority higher orlower. The tweak is called niceness, and macOS (just like other UNIX systems)has two commands: nice and renice. With nice command, you set the initialpriority, with renice you change it for the currently running process.
Here’s how to change the priority of the backup process:
- Open Activity Monitor
- Make sure that the PID column is visible. Go to View->Columns menu in the menu bar (menu at the top of the screen) and enable Process ID.
- Sort processes in the list by Process Name and find the backupd process. Note its PID. In my case, it was 5200.
- Run following command in the Terminal:
where <PID> is the value from the Activity Monitor, so for me the command was
Note the value under NI column. By default, this value isalways 0.
So, now we can change niceness and adjust priority higher orlower. The acceptable range of values is from -20 to 20.
To set the priority higher the value should be lower.
To set the priority lower the value should be higher.
Since we want to increase the priority, we will set thevalue to -20 (the lower the value, the higher is priority).
Here is the command:
Again, replace <PID> with the value from the Activity Monitor, like this:
User-friendly approach
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. Whilewe were able to eliminate the wait time and make sure that Time Machine isworking as hard as possible, this may not be enough.
In the simplest form, the backup process is reading datafrom one disk and writing it on another. So, the speed of the backup depends onthe read speed of the primary storage and write speed of the backup drive.Also, in the case of AirPort Time Capsule or NAS, it depends on the networkspeed.
The Speed of The Primary Storage Drive
The speed of the primary disk on Mac varies widely from onemodel to another. Generally, MacBook Pro disk is faster than MacBook Air,models with SSDs are faster than models with HDDs, and newer Mac models arefaster than their predecessors.
![Backup Backup](https://i1.wp.com/gadgetarq.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/9a-4.jpg?resize=1024%2C363&ssl=1)
When I was testing the impact of a FileVault on the diskperformance, I tested the disk performance on various Macs I had at home. Therange was from 81.7 MB/s on Mac Mini 2012 to 1885 on MacBook Pro 15-inch 2016.
You may say that that the disk in the Mac cannot bereplaced. That’s not necessarily true. It is true for MacBooks Pro built after2015 and MacBooks Air built after 2017, but older models are upgradeable.
What’s cool is that besides getting a larger disk, you getinsanely fast speeds as well.
Let’s what I mean on the example of upgrading my MacBook Air2014. Currently, it has a 128GB disk, and the read performance is 314 MB/s.
There are multiple storage upgrade options on the market.Two brands are among the best in particular: OWC and Feather.
For instance, this 512GB Feather SSD compatible with my MBA increases read performance up to 3100 MB/s. That’s a 10x increase in speed!
And a little bit more expensive 480 GB SSD from OWC boasts read speeds up to 3200 MB/s.
Replacing SSD is very easy, even I can do it!
Note: Make sure to read compatibility notes for SSDs.Feather has a nice chart in the description which tells which of their productsis compatible with which Mac.
Another way to check the upgradeability of the Mac iscrucial.com. I’ve been using their scanner for decades when I needed to knowwhich HDD or RAM is compatible with my computer.
The Speed of the Backup Drive
The good thing about upgrading primary storage and improvingits read performance is that Time Machine is not the only thing that benefitsfrom the upgrade. Literally, every app runs faster (possibly 10x faster) now.
However, when it comes to the backup process, the biggestbang for the buck is choosing the right external hard drive.
For instance, I tested the difference in performance between backing up on an external hard drive and on a thumb drive.
Didn’t you know that it is possible to backup on a flash drive? Yes, you can. Flash drives work exactly the same way as external hard drives. The difference is usually the speed: flash drives are usually way slower (sometimes 10x-30x slower).
As expected in my experiment, the flash drive performed very poorly. I compared the performance of a generic cheap thumb drive (no brand name) with a Toshiba Canvio Basics 4TB Portable External Hard Drive.
Since my flash drive was limited to 32GB, I backed up a brand new MacBook without any applications installed. The backup size was around 20GB.
Here is the difference performance:
- It took 59 min (almost an hour) to back up 20GB with Time Machine on a cheap flash drive.
- On the other hand, it took 38 minutes to do the same backup on Toshiba external HDD (35% less time).
Conclusion
We reviewed several ways to speed up Time Machine backups.
Some of them didn’t require any financial investments:manipulating backup process priority.
Others require purchasing extra hardware, and they generallyprovide long term benefits.
If you need recommendations for the best external devicesfor Time Machine, you can find them below. But even if you decide to go withdrives other than I recommend, please go with well-known brands.
Never buy hardware with a name you can’t pronounce, such as Junlipu or Shenmazan. Note: these are not real names, I just made them up, but you get the point.
I am just amazed at how unknown brands get thousands of 5-starreviews on Amazon, and I try to stay away from those.
Remember, losing a backup may be much more costly thaninvesting in a more expensive but reliable brand.
Here is my list:
Time Machine Backup
- Best Thunderbolt Drive For Time Machine
Time Machine is a built-in feature on your Mac. It’s one of the most important ones as it automatically backs up all of your files on an external drive (and restores them if they’re ever deleted).
What to do if Time Machine won't back up
Unfortunately, many Mac users have reported that they’re having difficulty backing up with Time Machine after upgrading their computers to macOS Mojave. If you’re one of those users, check out our tips for troubleshooting when Time Machine won’t back up your files.
Make sure your external hard drive’s file system is compatible with Time Machine
What Files Does Time Machine Backup Time Machine
One potential problem that may prevent Time Machine from performing backups is that your external hard drive is formatted incorrectly, making it incompatible with Time Machine.
While Windows FAT and NTFS are used as the default file system for many external drives, Time Machine can’t use them — it requires a native macOS format. However, there is one macOS format that doesn’t work, either: APFS. While it’s fine that your Mac uses APFS, Time Machine can’t.
To determine the format of your external hard drive:
- Connect your external drive to your Mac.
- In Finder, select the drive from the left sidebar and click Get Info. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Command-I.
- Your drive’s format will appear in the list of general information next to Format:
If your external drive is in one of these unsupported formats, you’ll need to reformat it correctly before it’s used to back up your Mac. In order to work with Time Machine, your external drive needs to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a GUID Partition Table (GPT).
Here’s how to format your external drive using Disk Utility:
- Connect your external drive to your Mac.
- In Finder, go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
- In Disk Utility, select your external drive from the list on the left.
- Select Erase from the top of the window.
- In the pop-up window, you have the option to rename your drive and change its format. Change the format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and click Erase.
Now that your external drive is in a compatible format, you should be able to back up to it with Time Machine.
Check your external hard drive’s free space
If reformatting your external drive didn’t work, you need to make sure that your external hard drive has enough available space to back up files (go to Disk Utility to check how much free space is left). If it doesn’t, you’ll need to delete some unneeded files to free up space or start backing up your Mac to a new hard drive.
If you’re having trouble backing up your data with Time Machine, you can try performing some basic tweaks to resolve the issue. There is a dedicated app to help you out. CleanMyMac X is a Mac cleaning utility that also runs a set of maintenance scripts that rotate system logs, remove temporary files, and perform other optimization tasks.
It can help you fix the issue with Time Machine and additionally speed up processes on your Mac. Try CleanMyMac X now.
What to do when Time Machine backup fails repeatedly
Clean up Time Machine and back up again
Time Machine uses some extra files to help it work. Sometimes, when Time Machine fails, it leaves some files around that it was using temporarily to help it work. Safely deleting these files and “cleaning up” Time Machine may fix any issues you’re having with backups.
To do this, you’ll need to first turn Time Machine off:
- Open System Preferences and go to the Time Machine tab > deselect Back Up Automatically.
Next, clean up Time Machine’s working files:
- Open Finder.
- Go to your external hard drive.
- Open the “Backups.backupdb” folder and move the file ending in “.inProgress” to the Trash.
- Empty the Trash.
- Restart your Mac.
What Files Does Time Machine Backup Files
After this, turnTime Machine back on and start a new backup.
Check if other processes are causing problems with Time Machine
What Files Does Time Machine Backup
In some instances, malware (malicious software that can be installed without your knowledge) can prevent important applications from running properly.
It’s almost impossible to detect malware on your Mac without special tools. My personal favorite, thanks to its sleek UI and intuitive features, is CleanMyMac X. Its Malware Removal quickly checks your Mac for malware, including trojans and worms, and allows you to delete them if found.
To run a malware scan on your Mac:
- Download CleanMyMac X – it has a free trial.
- Install and launch the app.
- Go to Malware Removal and press Scan.
- When the scan is complete, you can delete the threats if any are found.
What Files Does Time Machine Backup Software
As you see, Time Machine backups can fail for various reasons. The first thing you should try when that happens is to make sure your external hard drive format is compatible with Time Machine. Then check whether your external hard drive has enough free space. In some cases, running maintenance can also solve the problem for you. You can use CleanMyMac X’s Maintenance module for that.
Hope it was helpful!