You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

User profile for user: EJW Tas
EJW Tas Author
User level: Level 1
62 points

com.apple.launchservices-231-v2.csstore - massive file slowing Time Machine to a crawl

My com.apple.launchservices-231-v2.csstore file is 630MB ! my time machine backups take 20 minutes every hour and all I can do for those 20 minutes is watch the spinning beach ball - mac is unusable for 20 minutes while TM is backup onto Time capsule.


MB Pro (Mojave) backing up to TC via wifi network on 5GHz


Can I delete the csstore file? I'm ready to throw my macbook pro out the door - 20 minutes downtime every hour is rubbish for a top of the line notebook

any suggestions welcomed


MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Jun 16, 2020 11:28 PM

Reply

Similar questions

4 replies
User profile for user: John Galt
John Galt
User level: Level 10
147,564 points

Jun 17, 2020 11:28 AM in response to EJW Tas

Something's not right with that. If nothing else, Time Machine's routine backups should never result in appearance of the "wait cursor" regardless of the files it's backing up; the total number of them or their sizes. Never. It's definitely a symptom of something though, and that something may be impending failure of your MacBook Pro's storage device.


Besides, 630 MB is not abnormal at all, so I'm curious why you are implicating it. If you have reason to believe it's a problem by all means explain.


If you are convinced it's a concern, you might want to consider rebuilding the Launch Services database. The basic instructions can be found in this Discussion:


How to rebuild Launch Services Database in Sierra?


Rest assured those instructions remain unchanged for Catalina and should remain unchanged for Mojave, but my personal opinion it's not worth doing. If you should choose to do that anyway, please heed all the warnings and reboot your Mac afterward. Since there is reason to suspect that Mac's hard disk is on its way out, rebuilding the Launch Services database may be all it takes to push it over the edge.

Reply
User profile for user: EJW Tas
EJW Tas Author
User level: Level 1
62 points

Jun 17, 2020 8:49 PM in response to John Galt

Thanks - the link with the csstore is based on plenty of other postings here and elsewhere on web - my TM increemental backups are typically 1GB+ and take 20 minutes


as for TM - for those 20 minutes every hour when it's backing up - I open a folder of 5 files = spinning beachball; close a folder = spinning beachball; connect to server = spinning beachball, click on file = spinning beachball. Absolute rubbish for $2500 laptop.


Have stopped using TM and deleted sparsebundle on my TimeCapsule and sudden 100% improvement, so I know it's TM that is the culprit. I use Carbon Copy Cloner as well, but it doesn't offer the option of incremental backups. But for my sanity (and continued existence of laptop - seriously close to bending it over my knee) I have killed TM and now solely rely on CCC. CCC has nil impact on MB Pro performance at all.


I tried to replace the TM backup by deleting the sparsebundle and restarting TM with new backup file, but when it was going to take 23hours to backup 125GB over 5GHz wifi - I gave up on TM/TC as a backup strategy permanently.



Reply

com.apple.launchservices-231-v2.csstore - massive file slowing Time Machine to a crawl

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.
Learn more Sign up