Time Machine seems to stop backing up

ajmonroe wrote:

. . .

I've not been able to get TM to perform an incermental since last night. I even let it run over night.

What happens? What does the log show?

Today I attached another external drive, same general type but using USB 2.0 and set TM for a new Backup set. Now when I try to perform a backup the status gets to "14.39GB of 144.91GB" and then it seems to stall. I've let it set for several hours only to see the "About - x hours" continually climb up to over 12 hours but the amount of data copied never moves.

Does the new drive have the GUID Partition Map Scheme? If not, reformat it.

I've installed the widget so that I can see the log information and the most information I see is "waiting for index to be ready (101)".

That's on the new drive, right? Do you see a few of those messages, or a bunch?

I've also deleted the progress file on the TM drive after canceling any backup.

That's usually not required. Time Machine should "recover" it on the next backup.

If you've having the same problem on both drives, something in your installation of OSX may be damaged. You might want to install the 10.7.3 "combo" update (and perhaps the "Supplemental Update"), perInstalling the ''combo'' update and/or Reinstalling OSX.

ajmonroe wrote:

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I set the new drive as MAC OS (Journaled).

That's the Format. You need to be sure it has the GUID Partition Map Scheme. Click the main line for the drive in Disk Utility's sidebar, and it will be shown at the lower right.

I did some digging and found where the system logs are and how to read them. From what I can see it seems there may be an issue with the indexing. Per your comment above, is it okay to run the "combo" update since I'm already at 10.7.3?

Yes, that's a common fix for OSX problems. It contains all the changes from 10.7.1, 10.7.2, and 10.7.3, so installing it will fix anything that's been damaged in any of those updates.

I'm experiencing this exact same problem. Can you tell me which Finale files you had to remove and where they are located? Thanks.

If "ajmonroe" can't tell you … I can! Because I just spent a couple of hours banging my head against the wall wondering why my laptop's Time Machine backup would hang at exactly the same spot each time -- even after I erased my Time Capsule's drive and started over!

I remembered reading elsewhere on the web that Time Machine backups that stall or hang may be affected by some kind of Spotlight issue. I then thought to go to the CONSOLE application in the Utilities folder and see if the logs could tell me anything. I saw dozens of 'em, all created right at the sane time I had come in and noticed the Time Machine backup had stalled out again. And they were all for the same cause: a plugin, installed by Finale 2012, called "finale.mdimporter" that is in the main LIBRARY's "Spotlight" folder. I trashed that plugin, restarted and … bada-bing! My Time Machine backups are working again.

I don't know if this was always the case with Finale 2012, or was introduced with the new Finale 2012a maintenance release which I installed on both my desktop and laptop Macs a few days ago… right after that my Time Machine backups stopped working, so I suspect it's this update that is the cause. I will attempt to let the company know, although I'm not all that confident they listen to anyone.

PONDINI … your excellent Time Capsule and Time Machine pages were what first turned me onto the idea that Spotlight indexing could be a root cause. You may want to make note of this.

Ken Gruberman, The Tech Daddy™ / Quill Music

Tech Daddy wrote:

. . .

PONDINI … your excellent Time Capsule and Time Machine pages were what first turned me onto the idea that Spotlight indexing could be a root cause. You may want to make note of this.

Yes, I've noted that, thanks!

Have you (or others) notified the makers of that app? If not, by all means do so, and include a link to this thread.

How common an app is Finale? I've already got a rather long list of things at the beginning of #D2 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting, so if this is fairly rare, and/or may be fixed soon by the maker, I'm a bit reluctant to add it there.

I just notified MakeMusic.com, the company behind Finale, about the issue, but they are notorious for not responding. I also registered for their Help Forum, but it takes a bit before someone there OK's me; then I'll post on the Finale Forums as well.

As to how 'common' Finale is? That's a relative question. I would say that anyone who has ever worked with music and computers in ANY way knows about it, as it's the music notation software that's been around the longest that's still actively developed. Although I personally espouse Sibelius, the better, faster, easier to use music notation software; I have Finale because I often receive files made with it that I then convert to Sibelius. Finale and Sibelius are the two top-dogs when it comes to computer-based music notation.

The software is well-known in music circles; educators, hobbyists, church people, studio musicians, arrangers, orchestrators and composers, etc., who all use it. Are there as many people who use music notation and orchestration software as use Microsoft Word? In a word, no. But there are enough that it would warrant a mention IMHO.

I'm a bit reluctant to tell folks to delete an mdimporter.

I'm not real familiar with Spotlight's "works," but wonder what it will do when it can't find it. Or are you putting a previous one there?

Even if Spotlight doesn't object, wouldn't it mean the files either aren't indexed, or aren't indexed properly? Isn't that a problem?

Do you have to delete the importer? Would merely excluding it from being backed-up work?

Just found this on the MakeMusic forums; turns out a couple other people have encountered the same problem:

http://forum.makemusic.com/default.aspx?f=6&m=352764

The plug-in is a Spotlight "importer", which adds metadata from Finale to Spotlight's indexing. For some reason, it doesn't seem to work well in Lion and causes the crashes and load that you are seeing. I'm not sure if it is unique to 2012's mdimporter, or whether any version on Lion will cause the issue. The solution is to remove the file Finale.mdimporter in /Library/Spotlight.

It's a shame, as when it works, it provides info to Spotlight such as Title, key sig, time sig, instruments, fonts used, and much more. So you could search Spotlight for files in D major that use a trumpet. Or Adagios that use Times. Or Soprano pieces more than 50 pages long.

This has prompted me to revise the way such things are organized on my site -- it's a bit scatter-shot now. I'm going to put them all in a new page (and include Finale), with links in the appropriate places.

That's going to take a while; I'll let you know when it's published.

Thanks for doing the "leg-work." 😉

Done. See #D8 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

I put links to it in #D2 and #D4, plus Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #9.

Cool! I just checked out the D8 item and learned something -- I didn't know about the 'hidden' Dropbox folder. I've excluded that as well. Thanks!