Hard drive backup issue in Mavericks My hard drive had some bad sectors recently, so I backed up, re-formatted, and clean installed Mavericks.

Everything seemed to work fine until couple days ago when I tried to look at some photos I recently imported to iPhoto, things got stuck and sometimes wouldn't move at all for up to 40 seconds, I knew it was a hard drive issue.

I tried to use the os x disk util to verify and repair disk but it all came up green.

when I try to run time machine it transfers REALLY REALLY SLOW and than gets stuck and says backup failed.

what should I do?
I had the same problem as you few years ago. 

You definitely have the sympthoms of bad sectors. If you can't backup with Time Machine I advise you to back your data from the finder by yourself and skipping the files that can't be read. 



Edit : You won't be able to backup all your files. You can't retrieve the data stored on the dead sectors.