Q: time machine slow in 10.7.5

Well, i'll be ticked if the ultimate solution is to upgrade to ML, as I have one or two apps that are incompatible

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.

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?

Yes when you disable Spotlught, then it doesn't work.

So, the issue has been reproduce number of times, there is nothing we can do now, except filling the bug report to Apple.

Apple are not reading thoses posts, it's useless to complain here.

According to Time Machine, my backup will be done in 54,015,439 days. In other words, the year 149,999 AD. Just in time for millennium.

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

hahaha

you've beaten my 5 months count for Spotlight to finish indexing

That tip about turning off Spotlight (and not just using the Privacy panel to tell it not to index anything) really does the trick. It looks like I might get my 1TB backed up within a day, rather than before the sun burns out.

I´m going another way: I disabled Time Machine and use Carbon Copy Cloner (does the same like Super Duper) for backups.

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 ...

hello gentleman,

i have the same problem

for me it is connected to a drobo

got a new one from them but still going very slowly

it seems to go faster on my mac book air

hello i have the same problem with TM/drobo/lion

could it help to install mountain lion?

ruud

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.