time machine slow in 10.7.5

FatMac\>MacPro wrote:

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.

That is not the only problem with no Spotlight. Some people report they cannot update App Store apps without Spotlight running. One gets the error "updates are available under another account", which is not true. Turn on Spotlight and your updates become available like they should. Spotlight seems to be a necesary element to updating MAS apps.

I have saved (downloaded in July) the installer for 10.7.4. I used this (on a bootable USB stick) to revert my two Macs to 10.7.4 via the reinstall method. All of settings were left intact, and it is as if I never upgraded to 10.7.5. Both of those machines are working wonderfully, indexing like they should. I don't use Time Machine, so nothing to test there, but the Spotlight issue is quite evident even in the absence of TM.

Well just for grins, not that Apple might see this but solely out of intellectual curiosity and too much time on my hands, I did a fresh install of 10.7.4 on a completely clean, wiped hard drive. My thought was to see if there is any possible interaction going on here with other software, which has been hinted. Once installed, with just the OS on the hard drive, Spotlight took about 20 minutes to churn out its index. Done! Mdworker reported for duty and did its thing efficiently.

I then disabled Spotlight and wiped the index, like so:

$ sudo mdutil -i off /

$ sudo mdutil -E /

I then ran the 10.7.5 combo updater. No other software except the OS X operating system is present.

After update, and a couple of reboots to settle things in, I re-enabled Spotlight, like so:

$ sudo mdutil -i on /

After about 45 minutes of thrashing and "estimating", Spotlight decided it was going to take 20 hours to index my OS. I didn't let it run. We all know that "estimate" is a work in progress, because mdworker is not on duty so it's only guesswork as to when it will be done. Also, rebooting will make it start all over again. It's just a waste of time to wait around on it, but my curiosity is satisfied. I would say 10.7.5 is the culprit, the only culprit.

Hello,

Try to reinstall Lion 10.7.5 Combo Update. This solved my Spotlight and Time Machine problems.

Francisc, is it still Build 11G56?

Thanks.

I haven't yet had time to go through all 18 pages of this thread but will as soon as I can. Thanks everyone.

Not only have I had the slow backup problems, at least two drives apparently have been ruined in the process of running and stopping the backup because of these delays.

Since this morning (before having discovered this thread), I have been backing up from scratch with a newly purchased external drive and it has taken > 9 hours for only about 20 GB, with many GB and hours to go. This is with Spotlight off for this drive, which has not helped.

I did get through to Apple earlier this week--they asked me to send info from Capture and another couple of programs. They said they were aware of some problems with Time Machine, but did NOT say they had identified 10.7.5 as the cause, and obviously haven't offered a solution yet, but if they do and it works, I will definitely post it here. I am sure that if Apple believed that reinstalling 10.7.5 would solve the problem, that would have been suggested earlier.

Until I found this thread I had no idea that so many others were having similar problems, and that the crux of the problem is likely to be 10.7.5, and not anything specific to my machines. So this thread has helped. At least I know not to try to backup incrementally a second computer with its second drive until we have a solution.

I had the same problem. I disabled spotlight for my external drive (in my case, a Time Capsule). EASY FIX:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4363794?tstart=0

Works awesome now, thanks to "DA Man" Dimaxum!

Good luck,

Rich

Hello,

Yes, same build.

This was my workaround:

Before reinstalling Lion 10.7.5 Combo Update, must stop Spotlight:

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

then delete Spotlight directory

2. sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100

3. reinstall 10.7.5

4. enable Spotlight

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

Thank you!

Thank you so much for posting this.

It did the trick for me (after 48 hours of agony)

I also tried the command

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

to be followed by

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

which I think does the same thing.

I tried installing 10.7.5 with mds unloaded and still had the same issues indexing after a reboot and loading it back up. I wonder if there was some other change that you made when re-installing.

Larry Nolan wrote:

So if you are having the Time Machine/Spotlight problem in 10.7.5 I suggest reporting to Apple that you are having the problem associated with 12136478 also.

Man, I hope Apple doesn't assign bug numbers sequentially. I have an open bug 12355407 on the 10.7.5 Spotlight problem.... that would mean that 218,929 bugs have been reported in between. Yikes.

Mountain Lion fixed the issue(s), for me. I installed 10.7.5 on Tuesday, beachballed to the point of a hard reboot twice that day, twice more Thursday (Wednesday was Yom Kippur!), and then about 20x today. The beachballs came faster and faster, to the point where I was nearly certain that a piece of hardware was failing (RAM sector, SSID sector, etc). I was very surprised when, $20 later, the ML upgrade seemed to return my system to normal, including a reasonably speedy Spotlight indexing, and a complete Time Machine backup. We'll see if I remain stable next week.

HenryAZ wrote:

FatMac\>MacPro wrote:

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.

That is not the only problem with no Spotlight. Some people report they cannot update App Store apps without Spotlight running. One gets the error "updates are available under another account", which is not true. Turn on Spotlight and your updates become available like they should. Spotlight seems to be a necesary element to updating MAS apps.

I've run into the "updates are available under another account" frequently but not because of Spotlight not indexing. I stopped Spotlight indexing years ago but updating App Store apps only became a problem when I cloned a partition and started using that one instead of the original. There's a file stored within an App Store application (part of the package contents) which associates it with the partition it's on. A new partition confuses things but deleting the App Store app on the new partition allows a new download because it's still the same account that made the purchase. Spotlight is not indexing the new partition either. Or, I can just go back to the original partition and then the App Store app is updated without issue. In either case, Spotlight, or the lack thereof, doesn't interfere with the update process. However, as we're seeing in this ever growing thread, Spotlight has subtle effects in a variety of ways depending on a user's specific system configuration and the efforts taken to fix the Spotlight/Time Machine conflict, so while it doesn't impact the App Store for me, YMMV.

This did not do the trick for me. Still more than 3 days left to index :-(