Yesterday while freeing space on a number of drives I found that one failed to mount so I had to use the recovery tools in disk utility to get it to mount. The process took a few minutes. Once this was done I decided to move all data from that drive to a safer place. In the process I came across the frustration of backup.backup, or some similarly named folder. It’s the time machine backup folder.
Recently I was using a one terabyte drive to backup a half terabyte drive and it would take four and a half hours to backup and I think I may have figured out why the software was taking so long. It’s because it was never designed to be used as I am using it.
Time Machine is designed to work with a hard drive that is smaller or as big as the system it’s backing up. When you get a one terabyte disk to backup a half terabyte hard drive it has the opportunity to save many more files than are on the system and this is fine initially but over time the number of files that it has to check gets larger and larger until finally it takes hours, rather than minutes to backup.