Time Machine unbelievably slow

8 minutes ago, phunktional said:

Share is in the array.

Very strange, you are in my exact situation, I also disabled hard links, but I still have very slow backups with Time Machine.

If you can guarantee your Time Machine data will always only exist on a pool (or a single disk) you might get some speed improvement by bypassing shfs. Please verify these instructions because it's been a while since I tested.

 

NOTE: Because we'll be specifying the share options manually changes to the share with the webgui will be ignored. Make sure the share's settings are already optimized for time machine before proceeding.

 

1. Record your time machine share's settings from this file:

cat /etc/samba/smb-shares.conf

 

2. Stop the array

 

3. Go to Settings -> SMB -> SMB Extras and verify this line exists near the bottom. If it doesn't, create it

include = /boot/config/smb-custom.conf

3. Add your time machine share's settings recorded in Step 1 to /boot/config/smb-custom.conf replacing user in the path line with your pool's name, e.g. for pool named "fast"

path = /mnt/user/Time-Machine

 

becomes:

path = /mnt/fast/Time-Machine

 

4. Save and start the array

 

 

Edited August 19, 2021 by CS01-HS

9 hours ago, Gian Marco Cinalli said:

Very strange, you are in my exact situation, I also disabled hard links, but I still have very slow backups with Time Machine.

Time Machine has never been very fast for me, I mostly care about reliability. I use TimeMachineEditor to only backup to my Unraid server once per day and I record hourly local snapshots (every snapshot is included during the once daily backup).

Just thought I'd add my experience with this in case it helps others. I had a ~250GB time machine backup trying to complete, the last one having been made back in June sometime. Every time I ran it, the speeds were painstakingly slow and it eventually just failed. I would come back to it in the morning and it had just stopped.

 

Based on this thread, the things I did that finally got this working:

 

• Turned off hard link support (Settings/Global Share Settings/Tunable (support hard links))
• Changed the Time Machine share to use private authentication, with my username/password combination, rather than public
• Turn on "Case Sensitive": (Settings > SMB > SMB Extras and add "case sensitive = yes", then save.
• Also turned on "Case-sensitive Names" on the Time Machine share itself: (Shares > Time Machine > SMB Security Settings > Set Case-sensitive Names to "Yes" and save
• Deleted the entire Time Machine backup (but kept the share) and started the backup on my Mac from scratch

 

I didn't do anything with pools/single disk etc. Can't say which of the above specifically solved this, but I'm just happy that it's now working. I started a 341 GB backup around 10am yesterday, and  by 3:30pm it had done 150GB, completing at 8:51pm all over wi-fi. Screenshots attached

 

 

1 hour ago, gooner_47 said:

Just thought I'd add my experience with this in case it helps others. I had a ~250GB time machine backup trying to complete, the last one having been made back in June sometime. Every time I ran it, the speeds were painstakingly slow and it eventually just failed. I would come back to it in the morning and it had just stopped.

 

Based on this thread, the things I did that finally got this working:

 

• Turned off hard link support (Settings/Global Share Settings/Tunable (support hard links))
• Changed the Time Machine share to use private authentication, with my username/password combination, rather than public
• Turn on "Case Sensitive": (Settings > SMB > SMB Extras and add "case sensitive = yes", then save.
• Also turned on "Case-sensitive Names" on the Time Machine share itself: (Shares > Time Machine > SMB Security Settings > Set Case-sensitive Names to "Yes" and save
• Deleted the entire Time Machine backup (but kept the share) and started the backup on my Mac from scratch

 

I didn't do anything with pools/single disk etc. Can't say which of the above specifically solved this, but I'm just happy that it's now working. I started a 341 GB backup around 10am yesterday, and  by 3:30pm it had done 150GB, completing at 8:51pm all over wi-fi. Screenshots attached

 

 

 

Unfortunately, what happened is normal, the first backup always goes very well, it is from the second that they start to slow down incredibly.

Interesting, I haven't experienced this. All my backups today have completed in good time.

 

25 minutes ago, gooner_47 said:

Interesting, I haven't experienced this. All my backups today have completed in good time.

 

 

Keep an eye on it then and let us know if indeed everything continues to go as it should.

In case it helps anyone... I ran 

sudo fs_usage -w | grep Volumes.Backups

to see what was accessing my backups volume, besides my backup software. (I'm using Carbon Copy Cloner instead of Time Machine.)

 

It turns out that Finder was updating every time the directory was being written, because I had a window open to the directory. After closing that window, speeds shot up.

 

Hopefully that helps someone...

On 9/9/2021 at 2:16 AM, gooner_47 said:

• Deleted the entire Time Machine backup (but kept the share) and started the backup on my Mac from scratch

 

Can't say which of the above specifically solved this...

I'm going to guess it was the last one you tried that 'fixed' it 🧐

 

btw, I've got the same issue too and I have to delete the entire sparsebundle and completely start over every time it gets borked (haven't tried running TM outside the array yet.) Frustrating to say the least!

Edited December 17, 2021 by Joseph