"Why Are My Time Machine Backups So Slow?"
I'm not sure I can tell you exactly why they're so slow, but I think I can tell you how to fix them. Time Machine backups on my Mac Pro with Snow Leopard normally take just a few minutes at most. But recently, I found them taking about 15 minutes each. Reading the status messages in the Time Machine preference pane, I saw that over a million items were being scanned during each backup -- twice. And the actual copying took place at a snail's pace, sometimes a few kilobytes at a time, even though I was hearing a wild disk chattering for most of the backup. Googling around, I discovered that Time Machine relies on a database called .fseventsd to tell it what files need backing up. When it can't read that database, is does the "deep scan" I was seeing reported in the status messages. But it should only have to do that once to get that database back on track. So, something else was obviously getting in the way. I finally found one lone voice saying he had fix