My Time Machine backup scheme has become unusable - the backup can take days if not over a week and trying various methods of shutting off spotlight or stopping local backups, etc. has not changed anything - now my TM gets to a few hundred MG and just stops.

So, I need an alternative - but a disk cloner is not going to work for me because I might need to fish out and recover individual files to restore instead of the entire drive.

Can anyone recommend a TM alternative that supports file/folder level backup/restore or perhaps a method to kickstart TM and get it working properly again?

I have no idea how Time Machine works.

If you want something new, I'd recommend a NAS (Synology and Drobo both make nice ones).

Are you running 10.7.5 by any chance? There were quite a few complaints about Time Machine running too slow after the upgrade.

Also check the steps on this page, if you have not done so already

http://pondini.org/TM/D2.html

that is likely due to disk corruption, either on the time machine drive or your computer's drive, possibly both.

for the time machine drive, option-click the time machine icon in the menubar and pick verify backups. for the computer's drive, run disk utility and pick verify. if either or both are corrupted, the best way to fix it is disk warrior.

you can still restore individual files from a clone. the problem is that the clone is whatever was on your drive when the clone was made. if you delete a file and then clone, it's gone on the clone too.

the advantage to time machine is it takes snapshots, so you can access older versions of files as well as files that have been deleted. there are third party backup utilities that can do that but none that work as seamlessly as time machine.

a good backup strategy is to use both cloning and time machine. they each have advantages and you can never have too many backups.

Are you running over WIFI? this can sometimes do that. I often will hard wire for large backups (If I have been away from the TM for a while) or possibly has the TM backup become corrupted? I'll often repoint the backup at the same disk but a different location. Then let it backup.
Or, maybe get a small usb 3.0 disk for additional backups. you should be able to get a 1 TB 3.0 disk for 60$.

Thanks all,

I am on the latest version of Mountain Lion (boy was that a mistake My Outlook is now a disaster) and ran the verify disk process. Hard disk is OK, did repair permissions and ran the verify option against the TM backup which took almost overnight. There was no error message, but at some point the verify stopped and a backup started - I'm at 3GB of 73GB, so it should be done sometime next week ....and if I need to reboot my computer, it gets to start over again (

Carbon Copy Cloner does both things. You can pick out specific files or use it to boot your machine if your original drive fails, etc. But CCC doesn't support the whole Time Machine "give me the version from two weeks ago, not yesterday" concept. And Time Machine is free, but CCC is $40. I use it on the road with a portable 1GB drive and it has saved my butt twice.

At 5.5GB now....we'll call that 'screaming speed' compared to earlier in the week.

what's your backup device? Is it a local disk or a remote device?

I switch between a usb disk connected to my mini and time capsule. Mountain Lion lets you have more than one backup, and switches between them. My macbook air also uses those same two devices.

Once you get the first one done, the hourly, etc should be relatively short, unless there's an os upgrade. Try to make sure the device is local or you are connected to it using a wired connection for the large backups. Just check your exclusions in settings, make sure you aren't backing up backups, etc.

Also, you might want to temporarily turn off time machine backups next time you try the verify. (or do any sort of troubleshooting.)

The site that Cordelli linked to has a ton of troubleshooting info for time machine backups. It's a great resource. Use it.

-David

It's a remote TM (the 500GB model) that's in an adjacent room - which I don't have easy access to now because I have guests there - once they head north I can connect a CAT5 cable and run the backup locally. A full backup is about 380GB (so not USB stick), but the differential it's trying to run now is only 80GB and has been crawling, but making some progress.

I've tried most of the reasonable options in that article - I am leaning towards wiping the laptop, re-installing Mountain Lion cleanly (the install was an upgrade from the app store) and re-installing my software, which is something I wanted to avoid doing, but might not have a choice.

yeah, it would seem the wireless throughput to the TM is really killing the backup time. for 300+GB it should take A WHILE, but not that long. I regularly do about a 45GB fresh backup in less than an hour. Incremental are essentially no time at all, even wirelessly.

Here is the info from my Airport

RSSI -67
Transmit Rate 117
MCS Index 13

I wonder if there is any trick to boosting my transmit rate - I think it really should be in the upper 170s sustained.

The TM has the latest firmware and I have the most recent Airport utility version.

What are your files like that you're backing up? One thing that can be a real issue is if you have *lots* of small files, it can be an absolute bear to try to get anything approaching a reasonable backup speed with them.

yeah, with those numbers you should be fine. Of course, an ethernet direct connection would take it up most likely 3-5x in real throughput, but if you can do that then waiting is all you can do. I wonder if there is some other process running on the machine that is throttling it to the TM?

I just switched my TM to a 5Ghz network (I didn't know this was an option) and my transmit now shows 162 - I hope this will help speed things up.

My backup is probably a lot of small files - but they never took this long before.