Trick To Speed Up Slow Time Machine Encrypted Backup

I have never been a fan of automated backups. In the case of my Mac also, I take backups manually at regular intervals.

But recently, I thought of giving Time Machine a try. It is fully automated and takes the backup of your macOS system hourly.

Isn’t that great? You can always revert back to any particular time in case of a data loss or corrupt OS.

Anyway, I started my encrypted Time Machine backup, and guess what? The estimated time remaining was 3 days!

I couldn’t believe it, so I went through Apple’s official forums and realized that it is a common issue.

Suppose your backup size is 100GB, then encrypting this size of data on a hard disk can actually take days to finish.

So, what to do?

Fix: Encrypted Time Machine Backup Takes Too Long

I found a working solution to this problem after going through some forums and blog posts.

Step #1

Stop the backup process and open Disk Utility.

Step #2

Then, select your Time Machine drive click the Erase button.

Step #3

A format dialogue will open. From the drop-down list, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted)

Then click Erase. It will hardly take a minute to complete the formatting process.

Step #4

As soon as formatting is finished, a Time Machine backup dialogue will popup.

Tick the Encrypt Backup Disk checkbox and click Use as Backup Disk.

If it doesn’t popup, then go to System Preferences » Time Machine and start the backup process from there.

This time you’ll notice that it will take a lot less than before. In my case, it took only half an hour to finish the backup that was previously taking 3 days.

Though, the successive backups after the first one will only take a couple of seconds or minutes.

Hope this saves you some time!