Horribly Slow Time Machine Backups
Yesterday evening - as I was packing up to leave work, I noticed that my Time Machine backup hadn't completed. True, there was a new Xcode release yesterday, and that was bound to make the first backup after that large, but still… to have it take a full day and not be done? Well… I had to pack up, but this morning I wanted to get to the bottom of this and figure it out.
What I found was that the backup was working, but horribly slowly. I started googling, and it appeared that the convict is between Spotlight's indexing and Time Machine's backing up. Since I'm not a huge fan of Spotlight (I use LaunchBar, and always have) - I was ready to turn it off. But as I read on, I learned that wasn't the best idea either.
What it seems was the best alternative was to start fresh with Spotlight. SImple wipe out it's cache, reboot, and let it churn for about an hour rebuilding the indexes, and then the two would peaceably co-exist. So to that end, I said:
$ sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100/*
then a quick reboot, and about an hour of indexing later, Spotlight was back in the saddle. Time Machine then backed up it's 6+ GB very quickly after that, and things were fine.
Sometimes, it takes a little help, but this technology is about the most wonderfully designed stuff I've ever had the pleasure to work with. Amazing.