Spotlight Gone Crazy indexing TIme Machine Backup!!

ericnepean wrote:

. . .

The response I received back was that spotlight indexing had been turned off for all volumes, EXCEPT that it was now turned on for

/Volumes/TMbackup/Backups.backupdb . This is my TimeMachine backup volume - I don't want this indexed.

You have no choice. It must be indexed for Time Machine to work properly. See the note in section 2 here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/8991.html.

The index must be corrupted. First, try repairing your backups, per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

If that doesn't fix it, see the pink box in #D2 of the same link.

ericnepean wrote:

. . .

The OS that is now limping along on my machine has effectively been continuously upgraded since 10.4.8,

That's not really true. Upgrading replaces everything in OSX and the default Apple Apps. What's left behind are 3rd-party apps and the files that support them. That's where most of the problems come from -- especially apps that you no longer use or have deleted, but left some pieces behind. Those will take up some space, but as long as nothing is running, there's no performance hit from them.

What does happen is, if the leftover pieces were background or "helper" processes, they may continue to run, or, worse, try to run, then fail because some parts are missing, and restart over and over.

You can usually identify them by looking at your system.log. See the tan box in OSX Log Files to find it, then the blue box, especially the Application Installation or Removal problems section, to find such problems.

Since I was planning to upgrade to Lion, I may as well do a clean install of Lion, instead of installing a clean copy Snow Leopard, and upgrading.

That's a bit easier said than done, unless you buy the Lion USB stick ($69). The reason is, to buy Lion from the App store ($30), you must be running Snow Leopard to download it. You can do that, then instead of installing, copy the installer to a DVD, USB stick, or partition on an external HD. Then erase your internal HD, boot from the installer, install Lion, then use Setup Assistant to transfer your user accounts and data from your backups, then reinstall all your 3rd-party apps from the original discs (or re-download them). See Making a Lion Install disc or partition for instructions.

Just installing Lion over Snow Leopard will get rid of everything in your current version of OSX (as would installing Snow Leopard without erasing).

If you do erase, I'd strongly recommend making a second full backup on a different HD with the Restore tab of Disk Utility, or CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper, just in case something goes wrong with your TM backups or either HD. That's rare, of course, but does happen.

Which leads back to the question of the Time Machine backup from 10.6.8, possibly with bad indexing.

Is it reasonable to attach the Time Machine drive to my machine with the new 10.7.3 OS, and let it deal with any indexing issues there, or am I better off to attach it to my MB Air which is stable at 10.6.8 but doesn't have any TM backup configured, and deal with any issues there. Or must I have the the "home" system attached to correctly reindex the Time Machine volume?

The structure of Spotlight indexes has changed in Lion. It will create a new index on every volume -- your OSX drive, TM backups, and any other drives/partitions (which may take a while, of course, so don't be surprised if your Mac is rather sluggish until that's done).

If you connect it to your MB Air, I don't think it will be indexed unless you select it as the TM destination and start a backup to it, but I can't swear to that.

If you suspect a disk problem, you might want to run this: Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test. Run the Extended tests (that may take an hour or more, depending on how much RAM you have). Write down any error code(s) it shows. That's not the most exhaustive disk test availiable, but would be worth a try.

Yes, absolutely!

ericnepean wrote:

. .

I really am suspecting this is a problem with corrupted OS caches

If so, you might want to try deleting them. The free OnyX app is good for that. When it starts, it wants to do a permissions check and verify disk -- you can skip those, since you've already done them. Then you need your Admin password, and it shows some warnings, etc, via Help. Select the Cleaning icon in the toolbar and you can select some or all caches, etc.

or OS configuration files.

You could try installing the 10.6.8 "combo" update, per Installing the ''combo'' update and/or Reinstalling OSX. If that doesn't help, a fresh version of OSX (that won't disturb anything else) might be worth a try, per the same article.

ericnepean wrote:

. . .

I note that in Onyx there 6 sets of caches in the clean menu, and each set has to be cleaned sepaerately. Some of them are specific to the users account, so they have to be cleaned for each user account.

Yes. General cache cleaning usually isn't a good idea; normally, if you're having a problem with one app in one account, just delete the cache in question. Caches are good 99.9% of the time; they speed up your Mac. Only when one gets corrupted should it be deleted (with the possible excption of a browser cache).

I'm still having one problem, can't get mobile me working on one account (it works on the other account), I think I'll need to referr to the mobile mee forum or Apple for assisatnce in that regard.

I just got around to converting to iCloud. Never had much trouble with MobileMe, so don't know a lot of troubleshooting, either, so that's probably your best bet.