Extremely slow Time machine backup

[Stephen Rogalla]

Hello i have a 7tb(all brand new drives) freenas with 12gb of ram running 9.10.1 with a Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5620 @ 2.40GHz processor. I have around 8 afp shares created for 8 users respectively. i have pointed my machine to the disk and have began the backup, after waiting an 2 hours it has moved from 92kb to 98kb of 444.5gb. I am connected directly from my mac to a gigabit switch and it looks like there isn't any data movement at all. i would like to confirm using the freenas for time machine backups works on my machine before deploying it to my other end users although it isnt looking promising. any suggestions or help?

 

[nojohnny101]

can you please list full specs on your hardware, what mobo and RAM?

have you tried just accessing the share like a normal network drive and not using it as a Time Machine backup destination? What happens when you just copy files (large and small) to the AFP share?

 

[SweetAndLow]

test your systems performance locally using dd then use iperf to test network performance and finally try copying a single large file over the afp share and see what your speed is.

 

[Stux]

Time machine does that sometimes. I'm not sure if it's because TM has corrupted the disk image, or something else. It will even do it to a proper time capsule.

If you find a cause, would love to know :)

 

[Stephen Rogalla]

@nojohnny101 ill have full detail hw specs tomorrow once I am back in the office. Yes I have connected to the afp share and have began transferring sparsebundles to the new freenas directories. All of those transfers seem to be within a reasonable amount of time.

 

[Stephen Rogalla]

@SweetAndLow what do you use to test your speeds on file transfers? Also are these shell commands "dd then use iperf" ??

 

[Stephen Rogalla]

@Stux not a bad idea I have ran into instances where a proper time capsule will create a temp file but show "creating backup" on the OS. Deleting that file cleans it up but i don't seem to have any time machine backup history. Last week I had a "112mb backup of 444.5oGB" message in time machine last week and now its doing this. So i think that images are being created on the freenas volume then being deleted or corrupt somehow. no bueno

 

[SweetAndLow]

@nojohnny101 ill have full detail hw specs tomorrow once I am back in the office. Yes I have connected to the afp share and have began transferring sparsebundles to the new freenas directories. All of those transfers seem to be within a reasonable amount of time.

You need to be way more specific about reasonable amount of time. Your idea of reasonably is probably way different from mine. And yes dd and iperf are command line tools. Search the forums or internet for how to use them. dd isn't a great way to test filesystem performance but it's an easy smoke test.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[Stephen Rogalla]

@SweetAndLow so i am running on a hp proliant dl380 g7 server. not sure if there is a way to grab the ram and mobo specs without rebooting the device and going into the bios. As for the transfer speeds i moved a 357gb image yesterday that took about 4 hours. i will give the dd and iperf command line tools a try today and post my results after. im thinking about just rebooting the server to see if that will resolve the issue as well

 

[Stephen Rogalla]

also i should add that all hardware checks out locally on the server and there doesnt seem to be any red flags hardware wise

 

[SweetAndLow]

Still not a great measurement but sounds like you are getting 25MB/s throughout but no way to actually know until you measure it.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[Stephen Rogalla]

As of this morning I have been logging the amount of data that has been backed up from my laptop to the time machine on my personal freenas volume. At 8:48 this morning 1kb of 442.29gb were backed up through time machine, last test was at 10:58am and it showed 33kb of 442.29gb. At that rate my great grand kids may have the oppertunity to see the initial backup complete for the first time lol. As for just mounting the drive and transferring data to it seems to be working fine, i will get an accurate measurement of the data transfer speeds shortly.

 

[SweetAndLow]

As of this morning I have been logging the amount of data that has been backed up from my laptop to the time machine on my personal freenas volume. At 8:48 this morning 1kb of 442.29gb were backed up through time machine, last test was at 10:58am and it showed 33kb of 442.29gb. At that rate my great grand kids may have the oppertunity to see the initial backup complete for the first time lol. As for just mounting the drive and transferring data to it seems to be working fine, i will get an accurate measurement of the data transfer speeds shortly.

Non of this matters. You need to test the speed of your freenas system. Right now you are talking about the speed of time machine.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[Spearfoot]

As of this morning I have been logging the amount of data that has been backed up from my laptop to the time machine on my personal freenas volume. At 8:48 this morning 1kb of 442.29gb were backed up through time machine, last test was at 10:58am and it showed 33kb of 442.29gb. At that rate my great grand kids may have the oppertunity to see the initial backup complete for the first time lol. As for just mounting the drive and transferring data to it seems to be working fine, i will get an accurate measurement of the data transfer speeds shortly.

How full is your pool? Also, did you set up quotas on your apple timemachine target datasets? If you did, how close are they to being full?

 

[nojohnny101]

My hunch is it is time machine and something is funky with that part of it. I have seen this behavior before on a USB drive attached directly and I can't remember if it just resolved itself or if i just wipe the time machine and started fresh.

Certainly you are not seeing the same speeds from transferring just normal files vs. time machine doing its thing. But again, as others have said, run some network speed test and post the results.

 

[Stux]

My hunch is it is time machine and something is funky with that part of it. I have seen this behavior before on a USB drive attached directly and I can't remember if it just resolved itself or if i just wipe the time machine and started fresh.

Certainly you are not seeing the same speeds from transferring just normal files vs. time machine doing its thing. But again, as others have said, run some network speed test and post the results.

That is certainly how I've fixed it in the past. Sometimes I think it resolves itself, but I've seen this behaviour to both a Time Machine server hosted on Mac OS X Server, and also to a 3TB Time Capsule.

Have you tried restarting the client machine?

 

[Stephen Rogalla]

@Spearfoot "How full is your pool? Also, did you set up quotas on your apple timemachine target datasets? If you did, how close are they to being full?"

The pool is nearly empty. I have setup quotas respectively to the size of each end users sparsebundle with additional space for growth. I leave at least 200-250gb per volume for growth. For example if John's current backup on the retail time machine is 300gb I have set his quota to be anywhere from 500gb to 550gb.

 

[Spearfoot]

@Spearfoot "How full is your pool? Also, did you set up quotas on your apple timemachine target datasets? If you did, how close are they to being full?"

The pool is nearly empty. I have setup quotas respectively to the size of each end users sparsebundle with additional space for growth. I leave at least 200-250gb per volume for growth. For example if John's current backup on the retail time machine is 300gb I have set his quota to be anywhere from 500gb to 550gb.

That all sounds good...

What version of FreeNAS are you using?

There was an AFP bug in 9.3 that was fixed in 9.10 (I let Josh Paetzel log on to my system to debug it - I mention the bug because it broke my Apple Time Machine backups):

https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/12967

 

[Stephen Rogalla]

this morning i logged into the freenas, decided to i had enough and rebooted the server. from there i removed the time capsule disk association, deleted the backup that was there, have the volume quota an extra 300gb and retried. from here it seems to be transferring data at normal speeds over wifi in comparison to last week. Last week I probably backed up 28kb in total for a whole week while today in 6 hours i have done 22.35 gb.