How long does Time Machine take for incremental backups?

[Mikuro]

It seems like Time Machine takes an awful lot of time every hour to back up a very little amount of data. I timed the last one, and it took 5 full minutes for just a handful of files (less than 1MB of data, I think it was). All the while, my disk thrashed furiously.

I don't recall it taking so long for every backup before the past few days, though.

So I'm just wondering, how long does Time Machine typically take to do your hourly incremental backups? And does your disk audibly thrash the whole time?

[eric2006]

For me, small backups are usually done in less than a minute. I'm not sure if the drive is acting up, because it's pretty quiet. It does slow down the whole system a bit, though. Has it always been like this on your mini? Trashing preferences/reseting spotlight index might help if something got corrupted.

[Mikuro]

It wasn't always like that, no — and fortunately it's not like that anymore! Since yesterday the backups have been perfectly speedy again (less than a minute, certainly). I really have no idea why the problem came, or why it disappeared. Maybe it was just a fluke? *shrug*

[aicul]

Maybe, some OSX background activity actually changed more files that you think. Those activities occur regularly. Typically they would address the caches, etc..

Its a maybe ... ;-)

[Mikuro]

Could be. Time Machine will tell you the size of the data it's backing up, but not the number of files. All I really know is it was a small amount of data (always less than 10MB, sometimes less than 1), but if that was comprised of lots of small files, that might explain it.

For what it's worth, I was setting up some SVN repositories for my XCode projects around that time. The repositories themselves are not big and don't contain many files, but perhaps SVN touches other files I don't know about. It's the only unusual thing I can think of that coincided (roughly) with the problem.