Spotlight not working correctly

Your search - spotlight site:pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html - did not match any documents.

I did find some references to Spotlight but none so far that make a direct connection between Spotlight and Time Machine in terms of a functional dependency (i.e. one that would cause Time Machine backups to be incorrect/incomplete). But clearly a sluggish spotlight signifciantly and adversely impacts Time Machine backups.

Then, peruse these:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/Metadat aIntro/MetadataIntro.html

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/OSX_Tech nology_Overview/CoreServicesLayer/CoreServicesLayer.html

The first question I asked was if "anyone knows" and the next two were yes or no answerable questions. By giving me URLs that require quite a bit of reading, most of which does not at all relate to either of my questions, you're basically saying you don't know either.

Interesting about Spotless. I downloaded v. 4.0.0 which works on my Macbook Pro which is running 10.7.5

Intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. If I knew, I would have given you a definitive answer. Since I've never enabled TM, I've not a clue, but pointed you to where answers might lie. Not my problem if it requires extensive reading and research. If there was a simple response, others would have jumped in with them.😉

It takes considerable hubris to discount someone's clear request for a knowledgable person who already knows the answer to the questions be the person to respond, and further hubris to instead inundate the requester with admittedly useless URLs that you don't even know contain the answer to the questions. And further this behavior requires yet even another layer of extreme hubris by assuming that I can't do my own Google searches.

Christopher Murphy wrote:

My question for all is if anyone knows the relationship between Time Machine and Spotlight indexing? Is fsevent database that tracks changed files for backing up completly independent of Spotlight? Or is it possible that Time Machine backups will be adversely affected by this (increasingly obvious) bug?

Hi Christopher,

I'm not expert on the internals of TM and Spotlight and the fsevent and .spotlight-VS100 databases...so yet another voice without a definitive answer...

but, anecdotally, everyone in three different threads - numbering dozens of people now - has had normal TM operation simply by temporarily disabling Spotlight. Whether 100% of all changed files were backed up by TM, I don't think anyone knows ...just assumes... so I see the importance of your question.

While I think that TM catches everything, I've still done independent backups of my data. I've used Chronosync, but there are lots of other options out there. I'm not happy about doing it, and dealing with this for going on 10 days now...and even less happy that Apple has not jumped into the fray to admit the bug and advice users.

Karl

I noticed that same correlation. Also reports are that Spotlight wasn't adding new files to its index. So I'm a bit concerned about what Time Machine is backing up. In the past I've noticed that while backupd is busy doing Time Machine backups, mdworker and/or mds processes are also busy making me think Time Machine has some dependency on Spotlight but that might just be the index to make the Time Machine backup itself searchable.

Just a little heads up: Update to Mountain Lion 10.8.2 fixed the issue.

The update itself gave no problems whatsoever (didn't need a clean install). As of battery life: I get 4:30 with a MBP 15" mid 2010 (should have 6 hrs). My battery is on 90% health, so I wouldn't expect to get the full 6 hrs. But I've already seen better then 4:30.

Hi,

To everybody who is struggeling with Spotlight.

Read my latest post ...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4375642

Dimaxum

This does not solve my issue. I've used mdutil -E, and I've deleted the actual Spotlight folder. In the course of the rebuild now on day 2, it still days 7 days remaining.

It seems to be solved form my MacBook Pro 2009 Lion 10.7.5

The problems comes up after Onyx index spotlight rebuild.

TM wasn't able to backup my data (very slow!!) and spotlight rebuild advise me 6 months time to rebuild...!!

Reading this discussion, one hour ago I tried command sudo mdutil -s /Volumes/*and result was:

Indexing enabled.

/Volumes/MyHDBackup:

Indexing and searching enabled.

Spotlight was tring to reindex my Time Machine hdd for backups, but it was not plugged in!!

so I disabled Time Machine in PrefPane, and after I execute command

sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/*

sudo

rm

-rf /.Spotlight-V100/*

Spotlight restarted and now time to left reindexing is 8 hour but is still decreasing...

I was not having the problem with 10.7.4, it started with 10.7.5. I did the exact same mdutil -E and removal of the Spotlight directory you did. And functionally Spotlight is now broken. I get no search results, and indexing is going to take more than a week at this rate.

Dausto wrote:

so I disabled Time Machine in PrefPane, and after I execute command

sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/*

sudo

rm

-rf /.Spotlight-V100/*

Spotlight restarted and now time to left reindexing is 8 hour but is still decreasing...

Don't want to discourage you, Dausto... but it ain't over until it's over... Please post if your Spotlight does ever finish and you're able to run TM again (both).

I purged the indices as you did ... and eventually got down to 2 hours remaining ... and it stayed at 2 hours remaining for several days. I ran some diagnostics for an Apple engineer, then had 3 weeks remaining... then down to 12 hours remaining ... where it sat for several days.

Hope we hear from you after 8 hours to learn that you were actually successful! :-)

Hi HerrDrKarl,

I'm not discouraged, but you supposed right!! 😎

Indexing was started well and this morning (after 12 hours), the status bar was about 80% and remaining time 9 hours ...

Well, I had to turn off my macbook to go at work, and when I turned back on, the indexing started from the beginning!!!

In the same condition I also have an iMac: indexing is up by 3 days with the status bar now at about 90% and remaining time is 15 hours ...

I leave it run for another day and then the game is over (for me).

I stay tuned for any suggestion (or, better, any solution...).

Bye.