The Bearer Of Bad News

[Kay C Lan]

On Sun, Oct 26, 2014 at 8:28 AM, Mark Wieder <mwieder at ahsoftware.net> wrote:

> Well, that's special.
> While I have the Untitled backup drive removed from Spotlight,
>

Sorry for taking a while to answer this, but yesterday I didn't have my TM
HD available so I couldn't be sure.

What do you mean by 'removed'. In the Spotlight Preference Pane all HD's
you do NOT want indexed by Spotlight should appear in the Privacy Tab of
Spotlight - although they only appear there when they are actually
attached. You do NOT want to remove it.

What version of OS X are you on?

I think this may only be applicable pre Mountain Lion, when many users
suffered from TM slowdown. Did you do a full reset? Turn TM OFF, disconnect
your TM HD. Make sure any other Back Up HDs are removed and such software
is turned OFF. In Spotlight, in the Privacy Tab select your internal HD -
this will WIPE your Spotlight db. Restart your computer with CMD+R, run
Disk Utility and Repair Permissions. Restart your computer, Spotlight may
'Index' but it should only take a couple of seconds. Make sure the
Spotlight Magnifying Glass does NOT have a pulsating dot in it.IF you had
some kind of custom set up, with certain folders NOT indexed, then ensure
these appear in the Privacy Tab before removing your internal HD from the
list. In Spotlight Privacy Tab remove your internal HD, this will force
Spotlight to completely rebuild it's DB.

The Reindex will take several HOURS so it might be best to do it just
before going to bed. Make sure Energy Saver is set to NOT go to sleep so
Spotlight can run continuously.

Only after Spotlight has completed it's reindexing of your internal HD -
the Spotlight Magnifying Glass does NOT have a pulsating dot in the middle
- then reattach your TM HD. With most recent version of OS X, with Time
Machine OFF, when you attach an external HD you should be asked something
like 'Do you want to use HD's Name as your Time Machine HD?', just click
yes. If you are not asked this question after 20 seconds, go to System
Preferences, Time Machine and turn it back ON and make sure the correct HD
is listed.

You should then be able to go to the Spotlight Preference Pane, Privacy tab
and your TM HD should have been automatically added to the List. If it's
NOT automatically added, something is wrong!

The first TM backup after you've turned TM OFF, Fixed Permissions, and then
turned TM back ON, will take a while, but after that it should be much
quicker than you are experiencing.

If everything is 'normal', try reattaching your other backup HDs and
turning on your other Backup Software.

Other possibilities:

Are you running any back-up/sync software, maybe to another disk, that
'syncs' the disk so that at certain levels (root level) it ensures the
latest file/folder exists on both or if a file/folder is missing it is
restored?

Are you running any software that might tap into Spotlight's DB, something
like the old CDFinder, now NeoFinder:

http://www.cdfinder.de/

which may have an ability to initiate a restore or rebuild the Spotlight
Index if it feels it's been lost or become corrupt?

Is the TM HD really named 'Untited'? Do you have a few HD's named
"Untitled". Maybe giving the TM HD a name like 'HGWells' might resolve some
internal conflict that exists with other HDs that you have called Untitled
which aren't used for TM but are Indexed by Spotlight.

HTH
As an aside, I've been away for 6 days and didn't have my TM HD with me
because I knew I wasn't going to be 'creating' anything, just reading pdfs
already on my Mac. When I got back and attached my TM HD it did a
'thorough' back up. I'm not certain how many TM Backups you have to miss
before it decides to do this.

To start with it reported 13.6 GB to be backed up, and 136 GB available on
my 1TB TM HD. As it proceeded with the backup the number grew to 15.2 GB to
backup. It took about 5 min to backup, it then started it's 'clean up'.
This took about twice as long, but at the end of it I had 172 GB available.
Nice. Since then, every other backup has been so quick I haven't noticed it
happening.