Throwing a Spotlight on Time Machine backups

by Khürt on May 23, 2008 · View Comments

in Life

I like my Time Capsule. Together with Time Machine my MacBook and Mac mini have been wireless archived … or so I thought. Over the last few weeks I started to notice my MacBook huffing and puffing ( the fan would come one and stay on ) and Time Machine seemed to be taking forever to complete backups. My Mac mini was behaving similarly and would hang ( the mini is a 1.42GHz PowerPC ).

Then one day I got a message from Time Machine saying something along the lines of “The last time machine backup was 7 days ago”. What!!!???

I manually kicked off a Time Machine backup but it was taking a very long time. I went to use Spotlight to find something and noticed that Spotlight was indexing the Time Machine backup image. 2HRS!!!!!!!


So here is what I thought was going on. Time Machine would create and image file to archive my current local disk for backup. But before it could complete, Spotlight would start rebuilding the system index, which would then be included in the TM backup, which would then be indexed ….

I tried excluding the Time Capsule disk and backup image file from Spotlight indexing but … Spotlight continued doing what it does and I am stuck with a 500GB Time Capsule that is almost full.


If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.
GAuthor: Khürt
I'm a husband, a father to two very smart kids, an information security manager and a web developer. I'm a Mac geek who loves photography, hefe-weisse ale and Ethiopian coffee. I'm @khurtwilliams on twitter.

{ 4 comments }

Chris Kakris June 16, 2008 at 6:49 pm

Actually I saw another thread (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1501521&tstart=393) that discusses this same problem. Seems to have fixed the problem for me.

Khürt June 16, 2008 at 8:04 am

Chris,
I think I had a corrupted sparse bundle file. I ended up blowing away the Time Machine sparse bundle files from the Time Capsule and starting over. Everything has been working fine for the last few weeks.

Chris Kakris June 16, 2008 at 7:58 am

I’m seeing the same thing. Have you worked out a way to fix it?

Khürt Williams March 7, 2009 at 11:33 am

Comments on this entry are closed.

{ 1 trackback }

blog comments powered by Disqus

Previous post:

Next post: