you could also increase Time Machine’s priority so it works faster in the background.
Bear in mind that Time Machine’s first backup will take the longest and future backups will be faster.
Is your Time Machine backup taking too long?
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Apple prevents these kinds of low-priority disk operations from using up too much of your system’s resources.
To do this, first open Terminal eitherusing Spotlightor by launching it from the Applications > Utilities folder.
terminate the Terminal window and let the backup complete.
Plug and play with this Time Machine-ready rugged external SSD that’s pre-formatted with Apple APFS to hit the ground running. It works over USB 3.0 at speeds of 10Gb/s if your machine doesn’t support the 40Gb/s throughput of Thunderbolt 3.
Unfortunately, the most cost-effective drives are usually the slowest.
Now navigate to “USB” to see a version (e.g.
“USB 3.1 Bus”) and Thunderbolt to see the maximum possible speed (e.g.
“40Gb/s”).
Get lightning fast read and write speeds over Thunderbolt 3 with the OWC Envoy Express.
Standard hard drives (HDDs) or flash drives are the cheapest options.
Even so, expect to wait a lot longer than a comparably sized external SSD or NVMe solution.
Check out our guides to thebest external SSDs,flash drives, andhard drivesfor more recommendations.
You canexclude folders that you don’t care aboutusing Time Machine preferences.
Plug and play with this Time Machine-ready rugged external SSD that’s pre-formatted with Apple APFS to hit the ground running. It works over USB 3.0 at speeds of 10Gb/s if your machine doesn’t support the 40Gb/s throughput of Thunderbolt 3.
We chose to exclude the Downloads folder as well asParallels virtual machinesand associated applications to shave off around 100GB.
You won’t lose any progress by doing this since any data copied to the drive is already there.
You may recover some space on the drive if your excluded directories are marked for deletion.
Get lightning fast read and write speeds over Thunderbolt 3 with the OWC Envoy Express. Just provide and install your own M.2 drive, perfect for making use of hardware you may already have that’s gathering dust.
If you’re in a hurry to get things backed up, use an external drive instead.
If time isn’t of the essence, a networked backup is still a great idea.
Sitting and watching the Time Machine progress bar slowly fill up is a poor use of your time.
If you don’t like Apple’s backup solution, you canuse a Time Machine alternative instead.
