Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Time Machine issues

Generally, I’ve been very happy with Leopard on my MacBook Pro, however I’ve noticed of late that Time Machine has been getting more and more cantankerous. For example, it just finished running—it runs once an hour—and it took over 7 minutes to backup what amounted to about 7Mb of files. First, I’m not sure where that 7MB came from, as I wasn’t even at the machine, but second, that’s a painfully slow rate. I’m running this backup onto a 7200rpm FireWire drive, so it shouldn’t be that. But when it’s running it uses anywhere from 20-50% of CPU.

Looking at the logs, I find a lot of messages like this:

2/9/08 8:57:39 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupdEvent store UUIDs don't match for volume Silver Surfer 
2/9/08 8:57:39 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd Node requires deep traversal:/ reason:kFSEDBEventFlagMustScanSubDirs|kFSEDBEventFlagReasonEventDBUntrustable| 
2/9/08 9:19:57 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd Error: (-43) getting cat info for item: (null) 
2/9/08 9:19:57 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd Unable to rebuild path cache for source item. Partial source path: 

Of course, that’s one of the more useless messages I’ve ever seen. I read somewhere that it might be related to Spotlight, so I tried forcing a total re-index (that took a long time), but the problem continues. Seriously, the amount of CPU burned is totally out of control, and it makes me wonder if the backups are even working properly. When I first started using Time Machine it ran quickly and painlessly. Heck, I already exclude huge swaths of my hard drive because I know they change constantly (like checkouts from repositories).