Time Machine Running Slow Problems??

YES, when running macOS 10.12 Sierra and after Sophos Home for Mac upgraded itself to Version 1.2.0.

 Time machine to a network Apple Time Capsule became so sloooow I finally turned of all Sophos Virus and PUA scanning.

Time Machine ran a lot faster with Sophos Home 1.1.4. and runs as expected with all Sophos functions disabled.

I would like to report this as a SERIOUS Show Stopper issue!!

In reply to MikeCox:

Hi All,

We are going to look into this problem. How much slower were your time machine backups taking? 

Thanks,

Victor

In reply to Victor:

I am actually using Sophos Anti Virus rather than Sophos Home but I understand that it is the same problem with the same cause for both software.

Time Machine backup for 1 to 2 GB took up to 1 to 2 hours instead of a few minutes.

Monitoring TM backup via Open TM Preferences - TM process bar advancing very slowly and sometimes not actually moving.

In reply to hellohgjytrjytr:

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. We will investigate this issue and hopefully can provide an update soon.

Thanks!

Victor

In reply to Victor:

Same problem.

 - OSX 10.11.6
 - Sophos Anti-Virus Home Edition 9.5.2 ( Threat detection engine: 3.65.2 Threat data: 5.31).

Speed with Sophos Anti-virus activated <1MB/s

F.

Its just taken over 24 hrs to backup 500Gb to a new blank drive via USB 3 under 10.11.6 (patched up to date) on the MacMini with the AV on

Time capsule via wired LAN is also very slow

For smaller backups via USB 3 - three+ hours with the software enabled and 10 minutes without.

I have tried both a safe mode restart and exclusions in BOTH spotlight and AV but no luck.

The only temporary solution is to disable AV totally, run the back up and re-eanble (like yea I'm going to do that often NOT)

In reply to Victor:

Hi Victor,

Same happened here with Sophos Endpoint Security, so it's not just a Sophos Home Problem. We have 400 Macs running Sophos and about 100 running time machine and had a lot of complains of Time Machine being very slow during the last two weeks. And very is slow is really slow. Some more info data that might be interesting:

- Slow is like 500 MB per second, so a small 3 GB backup takes about 6 hours (over USB 3)

- Excluding the Time Machine Backup drive for on-acces-scanning (and then restarting the time machine backup) does not speed up anything at all

- When you turn off on-access-scanning, backup speed is increasing directly to normal. Yesterday, I was helping someone with a machine, TIme Machine had been running for over 2 hours and backed up 1,3 GB of a 30 gb backup. I turned of on access scanning and the whole backup was done in less then an hour. 

I hope this information is useful and Sophos will release an update where this bug is fixes quickly. Turning of On Access Scanning is not a solution because we need to keep our computers secure..... and we need Time Machine backups as well to keep data safe. Besides, clients without administrator rights cannot disable Sophos themselves. So at the moment, we manually have to disable sophos so people kan make backups, enable it so there computers are safe again... which is not very satisfying ;-)

Kind Regards,

Marnix 

In reply to MarnixKarssenberg:

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for all the feedback regarding this issue. We are currently working hard to find the cause of it and will hopefully update everyone if we have found something.

Thanks!

Victor

I too am having the same problem on 4 different machines. 

1. MacPro running 10.10.X (latest version on 10.10)

2. iMac (27inch) running 10.11.6

3. MacBook Pro (15 inch) mid 2015 model running 10.11.6

4. MacBook Air mid 2015 running 10.11.6

All but one are wireless but the MacPro which is backing over USB 2 to a Seagate drive (drive is healthy, as per Drive Genius)

The commonality amongst these machines (while testing) was Sophos in terms of third party background software.

Booting each machine in to Safe Mode yields a fast backup. On regular boot 1 or 2 gigabytes of data could take upwards of 6 hours to backup. Many times backups are only about 200 or so megabytes and that has taken about 5 hours to complete that back up. 

Additionally, why what turning Sophos off it doesn't end ALL Sophos processes? There should be a tool made just for that, otherwise one has to uninstall just to test if Sophos is causing the problem or not. I know that Safe Mode is an option but not convenient. 

Horrible! I just ditched Avira to install Sophos because of the same problem to find this thread.

I'm also running macOS Sierra and I backup with Time Machine to a MacMini Server running El Capitan using the Apple Server App (Time Machine Service). When Sophos was on, the backup was forever stuck on "Preparing backup". The backupd and logd processes constantly used about 80% CPU and nothing started (even after 8 hours of waiting). Immediately after I switched off Sophos protection for the affected Macs, the backups started working again. Please fix as soon as possible.

In reply to ChristophRomer:

It looks like there's 2 different issues here.  I am experiencing the slowness issue on OS 10.11 that gets resolved by disabling the on-access scanner (taking an hour to back up 200MB to my NAS).  In regards to Sierra specifically, I had the same issue with high cpu with backupd and logd (nothing transferring) even AFTER I removed Sophos Home from my machine... It looks like there's a separate MAC OS Sierra Time Machine bug on top of this.

In reply to JordanM:

Jordan, 

Thanks for sharing. However, I think you could start a thread on Apple Discussion as you stated "even AFTER I removed Sophos Home from my machine..." This would imply that MacOS Sierra may be experiencing a different problem. Although, I'm not ruling out that all of Sophos may not have been removed/inactive at the time of your testing. It would be a good idea to share your findings with the Apple support website community.

Dug out an old backup disk today so it had 40Gb to update (not bad in 12 days!) via USB 3

Currently have dropbox running though not updating any files

Tried adding backupd to the application exceptions - no help - backup was still slow

Tried every version of real-time / application / web protection possible - only return to normal speed is when auto protection is turned off (that turns off application automatically)

Interestingly - I also suffer from the USB eject issue https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6607988?start=270&tstart=0 BUT the slow copy does not eject the drive 

Had a good hunt through http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html (D8 raised a small smile) but no luck and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204157 did not shed any light either.  Tried also going into safe mode then out http://osxdaily.com/2016/03/19/fix-slow-time-machine-backups-mac/ but no luck 

Currently working through http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/212537/time-machine-ridiculously-slow-after-el-capitan-upgrade to see if this helps (not happy with AV disabled) with the throttle change - I know I only have one user on the machine so its unlikely to be permissions (though WHY DID apple remove the check option...)

Ive not yet tried resetting the SMC / PRAM as this issue sits in the AV.

One other smile post I found https://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?/topic/58600-bitdefender-slowing-down-time-machine/ - looks like this issue maybe common to AV over 4 years.