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time machine slow in 10.7.5

Since updating to 10.7.5 using the Combo updater, Time Machine on my iMac seems much slower. Anyone else seeing this behavior?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.5), iMac 21.5 in.; i5; iPad 32Gb iOS 5.

Posted on Sep 21, 2012 7:23 AM

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635 replies

Sep 28, 2012 1:53 AM in response to Larry Nolan

I can confirm 100% that disabling Spotlight fixes this issue. My Time Machine backup would not run to secondary internal disk or external USB drive. Was quite concerned that I was having a hardware issue until I started searching for a similar issue. Came across this thread and it turns out this terminal command "fixed" it:


sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist



Unfortunately that is slightly suboptimal as now I don't have Spotlight on my machine. If I have to choose between backups or Spotlight, the backups are going to win.


The backup functionality of Mac OS X is one of the killer apps for me. Apple, please get things working correclty in the near future.

Sep 28, 2012 3:12 AM in response to Larry Nolan

the terminal code thing worked also for me ... BUT when i open my finder and im typing in a filename i'm searching for it doesnt come up with any results - it says 0 objects. everytime - and im looking for files that are definitely on my harddrive. as soon as i activate my spotlight again with that code


sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist


my finder searchoption works normal and i find the files i was looking for.

does anyone of you have the same problem?

Sep 28, 2012 6:28 AM in response to sfbln2012

sfbin,


As you've discovered, stopping Spotlight will let Time Machine process backups normally but while Spotlight is off it won't access it's index for finding results to your search queries. Your choices are to leave Spotlight off and not be able to search, to start it up again with the command you've used and be able to search, or to leave it off and use something like EasyFind to do searching.


My choice has been to reenable Spotlight after I do my backups since I don't run with Time Machine ON; I always do "Back Up Now". It's easy to live like this if you create two Apple Scripts, one for each command. See the example earlier in the discussion thread.

Sep 28, 2012 6:52 AM in response to Larry Nolan

Me too, after update to 10.7.5, realized that there was something A.B. Normal about time machine.

It took some time because the good about TM is (was) the fact that it works in the background automatically

when I get into my office and the connection to TimeCapsule needs no intervention on my part. Now, thanks to all for the info about stopping Spotlight, it works, 1GBy/min now again. But the fact remains. I do not want

to act in any way on my Mac for starting the various incremental backups (one each hour!). We badly need an update which eliminates the bug! People at Apple are apparently too busy with portable devices and do not

care much about the good old Macs. For instance, I installed MountainLion on a mac book and kept Lion on

my main Mac. ML appears to be slower, energy greedy, less efficient,there are just some new apps close to

iPad/iPhone. In the world of Science all this is definitely NOT welcome.


Enrico @ Physics-Parma-Italy

Sep 28, 2012 7:51 AM in response to Larry Nolan

I've been using the sudo commands in Terminal to disable/re-enable Spotlight. Just now I downloaded Spotless, and at least that is less of a hassle: http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot4/index.php. This handy app allows you to click a button to turn Spotlight off & on.


I did my bug report, submitted feedback to Apple, and made the call to AppleCare, who of course seemed oblivious to the issue. They ultimately had me re-index the TM drive, which did nothing about the problem ...

Sep 28, 2012 8:02 AM in response to mattackerman808

mattackerman808 wrote:


...Unfortunately that is slightly suboptimal as now I don't have Spotlight on my machine. If I have to choose between backups or Spotlight, the backups are going to win...

As a general question, do those who depend on Spotlight look for files based on their contents (e.g., looking for a word or phrase within an MS Word document) or just the files themselves?


If it's just the files themselves, there are utilities which are fast and flexible for finding files without first indexing; they just don't support finding files by their contents. I rely on EasyFind, an App Store application, which, considering it doesn't index (and doesn't even run unless you want it to - i.e., no background processes like Spotlight has, which can slow booting even if all drives are in the Privacy panel), is quite fast. And since Applications are actually packages of files (do Get Info on one and you'll see "Show Package Contents" which shows the program's components), EasyFind can locate those internal components too. I'm partial to EasyFind because it works and reminds me of FastFind from Classic Mac days, but I'm sure there are other alternatives out there.


The point is that if you turn Spotlight off, it isn't a matter of "No Spotlight, No Search!"


It's just no search using Spotlight.

time machine slow in 10.7.5

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