MacBook Pro M4 experiencing beachballing

[in my opinion] the main issue is that your backup drive is too small for the amount you are trying to back up. Your Mac is spending a lot of time fiddling with the backup drive, likely trying to consolidate older backups to make more space.

The solution is a larger backup drive -- a drive that is two to three times the size of what you want to back up.

But this time, DO NOT leave the Drive-maker's software in place on the drive, and do not load it onto your Mac. Instead, use Disk Utility to completely ERASE the new drive (and have Disk Utility control the drive).

You can freely ADD an additional drive at any time, and Time Machine will alternate -- every-other backup goes to every-other drive. Any backup drive can be removed at any time.

--------

There are other minor issues as well. You have some obsolete software from more than a decade ago installed, including now completely deprecated Flash Player, and remnants of a previous installation of Chrome.

These forums are informally called "Apple discussions", and Readers are eager to talk about this stuff.

Why yes, it is.

When you enable Time Machine, Time Machine stages backups (by creating "snapshots" -- lists of files to be backed up) on your boot drive. When you connect the external drive, it attempts to place the files from those snapshots onto the backup drive.

Backup:

  Time Machine information is limited without Full Disk Access

  Destinations: 

    P**************l [Local] (Last used)

  19 local snapshots

  Oldest local snapshot: 2025-11-10 01:14:53

  Last local snapshot: 2026-01-27 10:37:22

to my eye, that says you have a snapshot from a month ago on your boot drive, and 19 others including one from today.

this Volume:

disk4s2 - P**************l

    Filesystem: Journaled HFS+

    Mount point: /Volumes/P**************l

    Used: 916.22 GB

    Size: 999.86 GB

    Free: 83.64 GB

    Available: 83.79 GB

... is over-full at only about 8.3 percent free out of about 1000 GB. Time Machine will generally leave more space free when it can.

In addition, these processes are hogging CPU, leading to the beach-balling:

Top Processes Snapshot by CPU:

  Process (count) CPU (Source - Location)

  mediaanalysisd 108.90 % (Apple)

  mdworker_shared (27) 64.43 % (Apple)

  WindowServer 22.94 % (Apple)

  EtreCheckPro 12.90 % (Etresoft, Inc.)

  com.apple.WebKit.WebContent (4) 10.38 % (Apple)

Top Processes Snapshot by Energy Use:

  Process (count) Energy (0-100) (Source - Location)

  mediaanalysisd 24 (Apple)

  WindowServer 11 (Apple)

  mds 8 (Apple)

  com.apple.WebKit.WebContent (4) 4 (Apple)

  mds_stores (2) 4 (Apple)

media analysis is looking at your media files, calculating meta-data like faces in your photos and files.

mdworker, mds, and mds_stores are doing the heavy lifting for Time Machine backups.

your report suggests your drive was connected when you ran the report.

Faces in photos should just make one pass through the photos and be mostly done. So you need not turn it off, just wait for it to finish and its use should go down dramatically.

Readers can help provide explicit directions to navigate to the directories where antique software is stored, if you need assistance with that. DO NOT download any third-party removers or CleanMyMac -- they cause no end of grief.