time machine slow in 10.7.5

The workaround is fine, but it comes at the expense of Spotlight indexing. I'm not willing to give that up.

I am trying that workaround and it is backing up at a decent speed. I hope to reactivate spotlight again after the full backup.

I wonder if this is only happening in new full backups or to everybody in regular hourly backups.

I am trying that workaround and it is backing up at a decent speed. I hope to reactivate spotlight again after the full backup.

Hey Dudes!

We are running in circles!

Be aware: It is not a Time Machine issue. It is a problem of Spotlight. If Spotlight is disabled Time Machine will be fine. BUT if you are re-enabling Spotlight you will run into an everlasting process of indicating - connected Time Machine Drive or not …

Greetings!

Thanks! Understood! I won't turn Spotlight on again until further update from Apple.

Can you limit the access of Spotlight to the main hard drive and avoid that Spotlight touches Time Machine?

I tried that work around, and it didn't work. Time Machine was still supper slow. Then, on top of that, with spotlight turned off, none of my internet browsers would work (Safari, Firefox). Re-enabling Spotlight fixed the problem with Safari and Firefox, but then Spotlight had to re-index everything and that took awhile (seemed like about an hour...not certain).

Bottom line: I think we are best served if everyone lets Apple know about the problems they are having. Go to:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/timemachine.html

I can tell you that Apple has taken a Data Capture of the log files generated while my TM was doing a SLOW backup. They say it should take at least 4-5 days for the engineers to review the data.

They might pick up the pace if more people register complaints/feedback at the above URL.

I won't turn Spotlight on again until further update from Apple.

Oh, you should it is fun to have spotlight showing you more and more hours, days, years (!!!) of estimating time. Besides: I can still use spotlight for starting application and searching files - I am just wondering what happens to new files - when will they ever be indicated?

https://bugreport.apple.com/

and

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Yeah, go for it!!!!!

... I wonder if this is only happening in new full backups or to everybody in regular hourly backups.

Incremental backups are just as bad 😟

I waited until Spotlight finished indexing and for an initial backup to complete (over three days) before drawing my conclusions. After that, incremental backups of only 200 - 300 MB still took eight to twelve hours.

The problem is that Time Machine does not back up files created or modified after it begins running. When it finally finishes, it checks for anything new that needs to be backed up, such as files that were created while it was backing up. Almost immediately, TM starts another backup, which could take another eight to twelve hours to complete.

Result: Time Machine never finishes.

Can you limit the access of Spotlight to the main hard drive and avoid that Spotlight touches Time Machine?

don't know. May be you could drag your time machine drive into the privacy panel of spotlight preferences. If you try, tell me what will happen 😉

This might not be a Spotlight problem after all. Spotlight is working correctly for me if I do not have Time Machine running. I can search for files normally and I get the proper list of hits. The search finds everything on my SSD plus any mounted dmg images. (I have several dmg images that can only be mounted with a password for security reasons. After being mounted Spotlight has no problem searching them).

Its only when Time Machine is running that I get the indexing problem on the Time Machine disk. While horsing around indexing the Time Machine disk, SPOTLIGHT RUNS NORMALLY, i.e., Spotlight's index is already built and correct! Its the Time Machine's index that is hosed.

To verify this I erased a USB disk and am trying to set it up as a Time Machine disk. It says it is backing up data but very slowly and is only trying to back up 77 GB of the 89 GB I have on my SSD as reported by the Activity Monitor. Prior to 10.7.5, TM backed up all of my SSD. In other words TM is useless however you look at it.

All of the workarounds of disabling Spotlight seem only to mask the real Time Machine flaw while losing a valuable search tool.

It seems to me that entering arcane bash level commands is a bit extreme except for the most experienced user. if I have to use bash, I might as well install Linux with is an open platform with worldwide development support.

Upon reflection, I 'm not goint to retrograde to 10.7.4. I'm going to rely on a daily point-in-time backup and not bother with Time Machine until Apple gets around to fixing OS X problems rather than iPhone and IOS 6 problems.

Has anyone else done a Spotligh search without TM running?

No, it's definitely a problem with Spotlight. I restored 10.7.5 to my machine, cleared Spotlight indexes, disabled Time Machine, and disabled and reenabled Spotlight. It then proceeded to take over 29 hours to index just 50GB of data on an SSD - something that it used to be able to do in under an hour.

Reenabling Time Machine afterwards gave me an estimated 1,885 days to backup the same 50GB of data to a USB 2 connected 7,200rpm disk. This number came down, but it stalled at around 20GB of data for approximately 7 hours, before then backing up another 1GB and then stalling again, seemingly forever. I ended up disabling Time Machine for now. The console reported that TM was "waiting for the index" - something created by Spotlight.

This is 100% an issue with Spotlight's index creation in 10.7.5.

Spotlight will work with TM enabled or disabled. That is NOT the issue. The issue is that the MDS indexing services are not performant right now.

I would roll back to 10.7.4 if I could but during my investigations I ended up destroying my original TM backup of 10.7.4. Grrrrr. I'd do Internet Recovery for my MacBook Air 2012 (the only way previously to get Lion reinstalled as it used a custom 10.7.4 build) but I imagine they've updated that NetRestore image to 10.7.5 as well now.

Ok, I've tried to backup with spotlight deactivated ... More than 1h for 300 MB. That's not a solution/workaround for me.

I've doing this test after reapplying the 10.7.5 combo disk update ... No success!!!

I'm busy to 1) clone my HD using disk utilities, 2) do a clean install of 10.7.4 (I've doing a SD Card with Lion Disk Maker), 3) install softwares and updates and 4) using the migration tool restore my data.

Nigth job ...

andre.s wrote:

Ok, I've tried to backup with spotlight deactivated ... More than 1h for 300 MB. That's not a solution/workaround for me...

Did you deactivate Spotlight using the technique in the link cygnetswan offered above or the "sudo mdutil -s -a" terminal command? I'd been using the latter but I wasn't able to completely shut down Spotlight until I learned about "

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist". Now, even booting is faster.

Deactivating spotlight using 'sudo mdutil -i off /'

Currently, I'm in the restoring data with the migration tool ;-)