How to fix slow Time Machine backups

There are some serious performance issues when using TimeMachine to backup your Mac over a network. In my case, an initial backup of 60 gigabytes took more than 3 days to complete.

Luckily, the problem can easily be fixed in three simple steps:

Step 1: Prevent .DS_Store file creation over network connections

Open terminal and run:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

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Step 2: Fix the OS X TCP stack

Edit /etc/sysctl.conf and add the following line:

net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=2

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Step 3: Reboot

After rebooting, your TimeMachine backups should run a lot faster over the network. In my case, it reduced the initial backup time from 3 days to less than 8 minutes!

So if your TimeMachine backups are slow, give it a try and let me know if it worked...