TimeMachine stalls - What to do?

Incident #1

The Problem

I ran into an problem with 10.8.4, where the Time Machine stalls at 114MB and just won't continue backing up.

The Analysis

The system.log shows

9/21/13 11:38:21.198 AM com.apple.backupd[33321]: Waiting for index to be ready (100)

And there it stood waiting for more than two hours. This couldn't be right.

The Solution

WroDos-MacBook-Air:~ appleadmin$ sudo mdutil -E -a
/:
	Indexing enabled. 
/.MobileBackups:
	Indexing enabled. 
/Volumes/MobileBackups 1:
	Index is read-only.
/Volumes/MobileBackups 1/Backups.backupdb:
	Index is read-only.
/Volumes/Time Machine Backup Of MacBook Air:
	Indexing enabled. 
/Volumes/Time Machine Backup Of MacBook Air/Backups.backupdb:
	Indexing enabled. 
WroDos-MacBook-Air:~ appleadmin$ 

Incident #2

The Problem

I ran into an problem with 10.9.5, where the Time Machine stalls at 222KB and just won't continue backing up.

The Analysis

The system.log shows

bash-3.2# tail -1000f /var/log/system.log | grep backupd

Jul 31 13:24:02 WroDos-MacBook-Air.local com.apple.backupd[95698]: Starting manual backup

Jul 31 13:24:02 WroDos-MacBook-Air.local com.apple.backupd[95698]: Backing up to /dev/disk4s1: /Volumes/Portable Backup Samsung 2TB/Backups.backupdb
Jul 31 13:24:12 WroDos-MacBook-Air.local com.apple.backupd[95698]: Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Daten HD
Jul 31 13:24:31 WroDos-MacBook-Air.local com.apple.backupd[95698]: Will copy (26.32 GB) from WroDo's MacBook Air SSD
Jul 31 13:24:31 WroDos-MacBook-Air.local com.apple.backupd[95698]: Will copy (39.38 GB) from EsDeh
Jul 31 13:24:32 WroDos-MacBook-Air.local com.apple.backupd[95698]: Deep event scan at path:/Volumes/Daten HD reason:must scan subdirs|new event db|
Jul 31 13:25:08 WroDos-MacBook-Air.local com.apple.backupd[95698]: Finished scan
Jul 31 13:25:08 WroDos-MacBook-Air.local com.apple.backupd[95698]: Not using file event preflight for Daten HD
Jul 31 13:25:15 WroDos-MacBook-Air.local com.apple.backupd[95698]: Found 12763 files (73.82 GB) needing backup
Jul 31 13:25:15 WroDos-MacBook-Air.local com.apple.backupd[95698]: 92.9 GB required (including padding), 167.45 GB available

And there it stood waiting for more than two hours. This couldn't be right.

The Solution

WTF?

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Footnotes