Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
I replaced the system drive in my Mac Pro. Now Time Machine runs very, very slowly, even after backing up the new drive. Why is Time Machine first scanning 300,000 items, then taking two hours to back up 6.3 Mb?
Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
The system drive was copied from the old drive by Carbon Copy Cloner. Because the new drive (an SSD) is slightly smaller than the original, CCC could not do a block image copy. Whatever it did do, left the resulting file system in good shape according to Disk Utility and TechTool Pro 5, but with something in there that caused Time Machine to "Process" 370,000 items, and to take three hours to back up a 20Mb incremental backup. I have no idea what Time Machine calls an "item", and Apple being Apple, there's no way to find out.
I had to abandon that attempt, and use Disk Utility to copy the drive. It did do a block copy, since there was enough free space on the source partition for it to get away with doing that. That copy works fine with Time Machine, so the problem's solved.
Sure is. In another thread (discussions.apple.com/message/21095869) there are some poor shmucks that had over a million files in that directory! Clearly a bug, and I'll bet it's all due to synchronizing calendars with Google calendar. Thanks for the tips.
I wrote a script to delete those files several times a day. That, and excluding the directory from TM backups, saved me.
iTunes is another contender (offender) in the useless tmp file sweepstakes -- crap piles up in your Library even if you never run iTunes!
I'd hesitate to exclude entire directories (especially in the Libraries) from TM backups. If there's anything other than throw-away files in there, a full restore from TM (e.g. from a hard drive crash) might not turn out well.
OS-X, with its unruly tmp files, is getting to be like Windows, with its ever-proliferating registry files. Apple really ought to make an OnyX-like clean-up part of the shut-down process. I'm guessing that a script that hunts them down and kills them could be written, but it would run for a very long time.
Slow Time Machine, scans 300,000 items, takes 2 hrs to write 6Mb
