Indexing Time Machine endlessly! Help

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Indexing Time Machine endlessly! Help

I have a hard drive connected via firewire selected as my time machine backup destination and running Snow Leopard (fully up to date) and it has been stuck on indexing for the past 5-6 weeks. This is not a network drive and I'm not using any sparsebundle images or anything like that. Just set up time machine from the time machine setup preference pane and let it go.

This has happened to me a few other times... I have tried in the past to repair permissions on the drive as well as repair disk but no luck. Last time this happened, I got so fed up after no solution that I formatted the drive and had time machine just start backing up fresh from scratch. Not a few months later does this happen all over again and the unending indexing tying up my computer's resources and making it so slow. I hate to reformat again and lose all of the time machine history but I am so fed up I'm ready to abandon time machine altogether. Does anyone have any fix for this?? I have also looked at some of the few posts in these forums about this but mostly seem to be related to time capsules and network drives, and as previously stated, repairing the disk does nothing if not making it all worse.

Message was edited by: Bryan Brindeiro

iMac intel Core Duo 20", Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on Feb 2, 2011 5:09 PM

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Answer 1

Feb 6, 2011 1:31 PM in response to Bryan Brindeiro

Can anyone offer any help for recurrent issues with time machine indexing that goes on for months at a time??

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Answer 2

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Feb 6, 2011 2:28 PM in response to Bryan Brindeiro

Cancel the backup. If it won't stop after a few moments, see #D6 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

Then try repairing your backups, per #A5 there.

If this continues, there may be a problem with the external drive, or the connection to it. Try different ports, cables, and combinations of the two (a plug that works fine in one port may not make consistent contact in another). If it has it's own power supply, be sure it's connected to a known good outlet; or, better, good-quality surge protector; or, best, U.P.S. system that your iMac is connected to.

Also be sure to always eject the drive before disconnecting it, or powering-it off.

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Answer 3

Feb 9, 2011 6:29 AM in response to Pondini

Thanks for your reply. I have tried your suggestions, repaired the volume using disk utility while booted from the snow leopard DVD and the drive had absolutely no errors found on it. Once booted back into OS X, once the drive mounts, spotlight immediately started indexing the drive again. The drive works perfectly fine in all other aspects other than for time machine's unending indexing of the drive. I have also tried a "full reset of time machine" - A4 which did nothing. The ports on my mac appear to work fine, the cable has been replaced, etc... Last time this happened, I had to erase the time machine data and have time machine start over as if for the first time, then it functions well for 6 months or so before having this issue again. I'm not sure what else to try except for giving up on time machine. I must say I have very little faith in this backup method that appears ridden with problems in my experience and reading other people's posts on the multitude of other issues.

Any suggestions on what I can try? As it stands now, when I click on the spotlight menu it says "Indexing Time Machine - Estimating time remaining"

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Answer 4

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Feb 9, 2011 8:24 AM in response to Bryan Brindeiro

Bryan Brindeiro wrote:
. .
I must say I have very little faith in this backup method that appears ridden with problems in my experience and reading other people's posts on the multitude of other issues.

That's your call, of course, but consider that there are millions of folks using Time Machine; only the ones with troubles post here, and most of their problems are solved, many caused by hardware. There are also lots of posts in, say, the Safari forum; does that mean Safari is unreliable, or just not perfect, like every other app?

Any suggestions on what I can try? As it stands now, when I click on the spotlight menu it says "Indexing Time Machine - Estimating time remaining"

+Repair Disk+ only finds things wrong with the directory, etc., structure of the file system. It can't find something wrong inside a file; that may be what's going on here.

Exclude the disk from Spotlight indexing, via +System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy+ for a few moments, then remove the exclusion. That will start the indexing over. If it completes in a reasonable time, it was something in the index, and backups will probably be ok; if it continues indefinitely, there's a file or files it's having trouble with, and so is Time Machine. Exclude it again and see if your backups run normally.

If that doesn't help, are you running Windoze via Parallels, VmWare, or the like? If so, exclude the virtual machine files from Time Machine, per #10 in [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum), and delete all backups of them, via #12 in the FAQ. You can back them up separately (and save a lot of space on your TM drive).

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Answer 5

Feb 9, 2011 11:45 AM in response to Pondini

One thing to mention is that through all of this endless spotlight indexing, I have not gotten any time machine backup errors, and it appears that is has been backing up as usual through all of this, even while spotlight has been chugging away...

Per your suggestions:

1. I have read elsewhere that excluding Time Machine from spotlight indexing is actually ignored and does nothing because OS X will still index it regardless, and this is what I have observed. I actually already had Time Machine listed in the exclusions before I posted yet spotlight continues to try to index it anyway. Nonetheless, I have tried your suggestion to get the indexing process to start over by removing the exclusion, then readding it and unmounting the drive and remounting, and adding again removing the exclusion - it does not appear to do anything as Spotlight attempts to index Time Machine regardless of being excluded.

2. I do have virtualbox installed with a windows VM (though haven't run it in nearly a year) - the funny thing is, all of these files were already in my exclusions for time machine yet when I open time machine's star wars view, the files are there on the backup. So, I did as instructed and deleted the backups using the gear icon in time machine view.

Still no change in the indexing process... Thanks for you help thus far!

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Answer 6

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Feb 9, 2011 12:19 PM in response to Bryan Brindeiro

Bryan Brindeiro wrote:
. . .
1. I have read elsewhere that excluding Time Machine from spotlight indexing is actually ignored and does nothing because OS X will still index it regardless

Yes, partly: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/8991.html

But excluding it from "normal" indexing does, sometimes, prevent what seems to be interference with TM backups. Why it does that on occasion is a mystery.

2. I do have virtualbox installed with a windows VM (though haven't run it in nearly a year) - the funny thing is, all of these files were already in my exclusions for time machine yet when I open time machine's star wars view, the files are there on the backup.

That sounds like the preferences file may be corrupted. Try a "full reset" of Time Machine, per #A4 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

I doubt that will help with the indexing, though. 😟
I had misunderstood; I though your backups were hanging with numerous "Indexing backup" or "Waiting for index ..." messages. If they're running ok, it's more a Spotlight problem.

One long shot you might try is actually deleting the Spotlight index from your TM drive to force it to be re-created.

Download the free [Tinker Tool|http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html] app. It allows you to change the Finder to show hidden files (among many other things). Select the first option under Finder, then click +Relaunch Finder+ at the bottom. Reverse this when done.

Then use the Finder to look at your backups -- be +*very careful+* not to move, change, or delete anything else there.

You want to find and delete the .Spotlight-V100 folder. You'll probably have to enter your Admin password.

Then remove the exclusion from Spotlight. It will be re-created.

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Answer 7

Feb 9, 2011 12:49 PM in response to Pondini

Hi I am having the same problem as this and I tried everything suggested and also posted a new thread. As I am having a new back up drive and while trying to restore I erased the old external back up, currently I have no back up at all and hence desperate to restore to normal. I tried to reset time machine as given in Pondini's page but even that did not work. I have been using time machine for the past one year and I am a fan that I do not want to change to anything else as it helped me a lot when my hard disk crashed sometime back. Any suggestion is welcome.

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Answer 8

Feb 9, 2011 1:27 PM in response to Pondini

Pondini,

It looks like we may be getting somewhere with forcing spotlight to start a new index. I deleted the old index using tinkertool and rebooted the machine. Now, spotlight appears to be indexing correctly with a progress bar actually showing some progress and the estimated time 16 hours (both of which never appeared before).

Will keep you posted. Thanks again!

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Answer 9

Feb 14, 2011 4:17 PM in response to Bryan Brindeiro

So i gave the process about 4 days and it seemed to get stuck on indexing with "44 hours remaining" so I tried the process over again, deleting the hidden file listed above on the backup drive again and trying to force a reindex from scratch again and it seems to have worked this time. The indexing completed overnight and for the first time in months, my imac is no longer trying to index the time machine drive anymore.

Thanks for all of your help.

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Answer 10

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Feb 14, 2011 4:28 PM in response to Bryan Brindeiro

Wow! What a pain!

Glad it's sorted out (permanently, I hope).

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Answer 11

SNPaine

Level 1

0 points

Jul 6, 2011 7:43 AM in response to Bryan Brindeiro

I had a similar problem until taking the OSX 10.6.8 update. On every backup, Time Machine would spend about 45 minutes indexing, then a minute or two doing the actual backup. While this indexing was going on, which is to say more than half the time, the associated disk contention would make the machine annoyingly unresponsive.

Adding the backup disk to the excluded list in Spotlight's privacy preferences didn't help-- something running on my system (maybe mds itself?) kept adding it back. I also tried deleting the index files to force a rebuild, but this didn't help either. I found I could avoid the problem by using launchctl to disable mds, but then all the other things that depend on Spotlight (like the very useful email search functionality) became unavailable.

The 10.6.8 update has fixed whatever bug was causing this. Interestingly, the Time Machine disk appeared back on the excluded list after the update, and it has stayed there. Backups are once again quick and unobtrusive.

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