How to speed up restore from QNAP Time Machine backup

[rhoulian]

Hi there !

I'm using a QNAP QS431 & Time Machine to backup my mac.

All is ethernet plugged in a gigabit hub (I just measured my internet connection : 800Mbps download / 480Mbps download.)

The leds on the hub are all green, indicating 1Gb network

The NAS is filled with 4 HDD (5900rpm - sata III), set with SMB3 and Time machine activated. The first backup took a while, but regular backups are ok (just a few Go to backup in general, which takes a couple of hours)

After changing an external SSD, I have to restore nearly 2To from the NAS to the new SSD : time machine says it will take 2 days ! the transfer seems to be around 10Mo/s which is extremely slow !!!

I know that backup is meant to be slow with Time Machine (allowing you to continue working while backing up), but restore should not be so long no ?

Is there any trick to speed up the process ?

Thank you so much

Cheers

[lousyfool]

A couple of things:
- Time Machine is notoriously slow. That's true for restoring as well, typically.
- A big factor is the number of files. Just guessing, but you're probably restoring a lot of files, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands, which will take muuuuuuuch longer than if it were a single 2TB file.
- Hard to say how long it will really take. Typical Apple, their clocks seem to run differently and change speed all the time, haha. The estimated time displayed may change many times. during the process, the initial "2 days" may change to e.g. "4 days" (or more), then maybe "1 day", then perhaps "3 hours", and eventually back to "2 days", and so on.

You can google around to see if there are tricks to speed things up, but AFAIK there are none. Just wait.

[rhoulian]

Okay... too bad... It seems I am back in year 2000 !

I read about a terminal command to increase the priority of the time machine's task. Didn't try, as it's supposed to work for backup and not for restore :

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

But as I already restored 213Gb in 5 hours (lol), I'm not sure I can try it without messing up what's already done ... ???

[lousyfool]

Hmmm... now you've got me curious, so I dug a bit deeper, too.

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

Careful... that has nothing to do with priority, but is changing throttling system-wide, meaning all system processes. Depending on what else your Mac is doing, it can lead to quite some CPU load. And it'd be this new state until you turn throttling back on again (with "... =1").

Again, Google is your friend. Learn more about both, throttling and priorities of tasks, e.g. here: https://macmyths.com/how-long-does-time ... ackup-take (and how to speed it up).

[rhoulian]

Well, actually this command did not change anything... Time machine is still struggling with 14Mo/s transfer.
Well, I don't have anything more to do on my mac since I need this restore first. I'll take care of throttling back on once it's finished, I hope before July

[lousyfool]

Ok... just in case: merry Christmas!

[rhoulian]

Hahah
Thanks for your replies ! Cheers