Time Machine and then Spotlight woes.
Hello All,
After many many years of use, the (local) backup volume for one of my
iMacs, which contains only my Time Machine backups only for that iMac,
is nearly full. Using Finder, I dragged Backups.backupdb to a new,
empty volume with double the capacity of the original backup volume on
a brand new disk which I had already formatted appropriately and
"Enabled Owners" on. The copy took a very very long time, but the
copy appears to have finished without incident.
I'd like to start backing up to the new backup volume as soon as
possible, and I'd like to never again do a backup to the old backup
volume. I'd like to avoid having to copy Backups.backupdb again,
because it takes so long.
First, some observations:
(1) The amount of space used on the new volume is 13.48 GB smaller
than the amount of space used on the original volume. This is
surprising, as one would imagine that a "copy" would have the same
size as the original.
(2) Spotlight went ahead and indexed the new volume during or perhaps
after the copy. Spotlight indices exist on both on the old volume and
the new volume. The Spotlight indices also differ in size, but not by
enough to explain the discrepancy in space used on the volumes. The
contents of the indices appear to be different.
(3) The Spotlight index on the new volume allows Spotlight to find
files which cannot be found on the old volume or on the iMac being
backed up. I discovered this accidently just by using Spotlight. I'd
therefore like to preserve the index as I assume that it would take a
long time to recreate. I found many many critical files which I would
like to be able to find again!
Before I feel comfortable using the new backup volume, I have
questions which need answering, mainly these:
(A) Is the space discrepancy mentioned in (1) to be expected?
(B) What is the explanation for (2) and (3)?
I would be grateful if someone could shed some light on what is going
on here!
iMac
