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. No access visible on drive's LEDs.

Then I noticed by accident, that both the Daten HD and Portable Backup Samsung 2TB are beeing indexed by spotlight (with no progress at all). Again, it seems Spotlight is responsible.

The Solution

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Spotlight is an accident waiting to happen. Guess what immediately fixed the problem?

bash-3.2# mdutil -E -a
/:
	Indexing enabled. 
/.MobileBackups:
	Indexing enabled. 
/Volumes/Daten HD:
	Indexing enabled. 
/Volumes/Daten HD/.MobileBackups:
	Indexing enabled. 
/Volumes/EsDeh:
	Indexing enabled. 
/Volumes/EsDeh/.MobileBackups:
	Indexing enabled. 
/Volumes/MobileBackups:
	Index is read-only.
/Volumes/MobileBackups/Backups.backupdb:
	Index is read-only.
/Volumes/Portable Backup Samsung 2TB:
	Indexing enabled. 
/Volumes/Portable Backup Samsung 2TB/Backups.backupdb:
	Indexing enabled. 
bash-3.2# 

Solved. I should add this to crond or, if possible to an timemachine-pre-run-script...

---

Footnotes