OS X Lion non responsive when Time Machine kicks in

I am having this same exact issue and it just started within the past few days. Same thing here, I can't play movies, audio files, browse the web, or even click to save a text file while Time Machine is backing up.

I decided to come here and see if anyone else was having this issue. Glad it's not just me.

Same exact thing here. I hope there is a fix VERY SOON for this!

Normal. Time Machine locks files temporarily so they don't change while being backed up. That's what causes the pinwheeling.

Oh, come on! Seriously? This is NOT NORMAL. I've been a Mac user for several years, and I product a podcast at http://HelpIGotAMac.com with ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY NINE episodes devoted to answering people's questions about the Mac.

Dude, I've had Time Machine backign things up since they came out with Time Machine. Until a few days ago, Time Machine had NEVER ONCE stopped the playback of my music in iTunes, gave me a spiinnng Beach Ball and kept me from performing ANY OTHER TASK AT ALL on my Mac.

This IS NOT NORMAL!!!!!!!

I couldn't agree more. This is not an issue with our drives, this is certainly a LION issue! One I hope they fix VERY SOON! For now, I am simply STOPPING the Time Machine backup every time it kicks in while I'm working on my computer. It kills about 1 minute of productivity every hour that I work. 😟

Yes, that's exactly what I did, turned off Time Machine.

I have the intent of backing up each day. But so far, I've fogotten to do so every single day since I've turned it off. Arrg.. I hope this fix this soon!!!!

have you tried to restart time machine from scratch?

in other words, reformat the drive (or use a new drive) and start fresh? there are lots of threads on the Lion/time machine issues: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3190305

a fresh start always seems to work though. (and the 10.7.2 upgrade helped)

Mine started right after 10.7.2 update.

No, I have not tried to restart time machien from scratch. To do that, I would lose all my incremental backups frmo stuff I've deleted over the past days, weeks, and months. That would be devastating to me!

I just want an update from Apple that solves this issue.

We've got it documented that it's happening to multiple people.

Yep I had the same issue right after 10.7.2 update so I tried everything to get it working....

Eventually uninstalling Sophos anti virus seems to have worked...there seems to be other users with similar issues

If you running Sophos try removing it....

I have never heard of Sophos before. So if it didnt' come with teh mac, I'm not running it. 😉

I haven't had quite the same problem, but this might shed some light...

As of 10.7 I've noticed that Lion is much, much more persnickity about having access to its peripherals. If a peripheral goes offline (e.g.: sleep mode) Lion will often freeze up until it comes back. This is particularly sensitive in regard to disk drives, and it tends to bite you more often than seems logical.

For instance, I use an external RAID array (SmartStore DS4600) for Time Machine. Under 10.6, I absolutely NEVER experienced this problem, but after the 10.7 upgrade it made both Time Machine and, for the most part, the DS4600 unusable. The DS4600 is a "smart" (or "green") drive... if you don't touch it for 10 minutes, it powers down each of the array drives. This is pretty common, most drives are designed to sleep after some period of time... but with 10.7, that meant every time the drive was 'touched' it would spin up, and being a 4-drive RAID array, that takes 40 seconds or so! When I do a Spotlight query, it might touch the drive. Open a new finder, if I'm unlucky, it touches the drive. TIme Machine of course, always touches the drive.

Now you can imagine, with a 40-second spin up time I was running into constant "lockups." Worse, it seems that the slow spin up time would cause Lion to "give up" now and then... probably too slow for it, and it just would stay locked up maybe 1 out of 5 times. That was a daily experience -- sometimes a few times a day.

My short-term solution was to disconnect the drive unless I wanted Time Machine to take a snapshot, then I'd disconnect it again. This, as a rule, pretty well sucked as a solution.

I finally found a better one, and it was a two step process:

1. I thought if I could keep the system touching the drive, it wouldn't sleep. Turns out it was a breeze to do this, I just created a LaunchDaemon job that basically touches a file in the DS4600 root directory every minute. It's set up as a system-wide daemon, it only touches the drive once a minute for an instant, and as a system-wide daemon it is always running. Also, it checks to make sure the drive is mounted before doing it's thing. Works like a charm.
2. But, alas, after the first day I came back and found my system asleep... I shook the mouse, it started to wake up and... the system was frozen. What the heck!?! Oh, yea... system went to sleep, so the drive went to sleep, and Lion "gave up" again when it woke up. Easy enough to fix, I told my laptop never to sleep and never to shut down the hard drive while it's on A/C power. Perhaps not ideal and perfectly green, but these laptops run very quiet and use low power when they aren't "busy," so it works.

For those interested in the nitty gritty, here's what I did to set up the LaunchDaemon:

First, create a file (named "com.hyraxintl.ds4600touch.plist" in my case, name it whatever you like) in the /Library/LaunchDaemons directory. This is what the file should contain:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

<plist version="1.0">

<dict>

<key>Label</key>

<string>com.hyraxintl.ds4600touch</string>

<key>ProgramArguments</key>

<array>

<string>/usr/local/bin/ds4600touch.sh</string>

</array>

<key>Nice</key>

<integer>1</integer>

<key>StartInterval</key>

<integer>60</integer>

<key>RunAtLoad</key>

<true/>

<key>StandardErrorPath</key>

<string>/tmp/ds4600touch.err</string>

<key>StandardOutPath</key>

<string>/tmp/ds4600touch.out</string>

</dict>

</plist>

Make sure the file is owned by the "root" user.

Then, create your version of the /usr/local/bin/ds4600touch.sh script. Mine looks like this:

#!/bin/sh

if [ -d /Volumes/DS4600 ] ; then

date > /Volumes/DS4600/.ds4600touch

else

echo `date` "DS4600 not mounted"

fi

In both of the above files, you'll need to make changes for your local machine and disk. For instance, my drive is mounted at /Volumes/DS4600, yours will be different.

That's about it. Once you reboot, your system will start touching your external drive every minute. Just be sure to change all of the paths accordingly!

After all of these changes, I haven't experienced the same problems with locking up that I used to. Time Machine seems to be working just as well as it used to under 10.6, thankfully.