Mac OSX Mountain Lion Time Machine Backup to NAS slow over Ethernet

Now this has happened to me enough times that it needs to be blogged about so that when I suffer with it again I can come back to these hacks to try and resolve it again.

So on Friday evening I started off my Time Machine back up and today Saturday evening it had only backed up 1.5GB of the 13GB I wanted it to.

24 hours should be plenty to back this amount of data up!

My setup is as follows:

• MackBook Pro connected via ethernet (WIFI connection good but ethernet better for backups)
  
• Western Digital MyBookLive NAS connected via ethernet.
  
• All up to date in terms of Mountain Lion updates and MyBookLive firmware

So in order to fix this I tried the following, one of these worked. No idea which one although I suspect the reboot into safe mode then restart is the magic here.

• Open a command prompt and type without quotes "sudo tmdiagnose" and wait for it to complete.
  
• In a web browser open up http://mybooklive.local and login to the western digital drive.
  
• Turn off the twonky media service if you don't use it.
  
• Turn off remote access if you do not need it.
  
• Turn off the energy saver checkbox so the hard disk does not go to sleep.
  
• Reboot the western digital drive just in case. if in doubt turn things off then back on again.
  
• Ensure your mac is not indexing the local disk by checking spotlight. if it is wait for it to finish.
  
• And now I think the magic. shutdown your mac via the apple logo then after a minute....
  
• Turn on the mac holding down the shift key so that it boots into safe mode.
  
• Stare at the screen for a while then reboot your mac.
  
• Start time machine backup again. 

And then to my relief my time machine backup over ethernet process zoomed along and I saw this screen within about an hour which is much more acceptable.

Now all I need to work out is to back up my Western Digital NAS to Amazon's Glacier storage. I think I'll leave that for another weekend...