Disabling Spotlight?
 

I was recommended by a friend to try out SuperDupe but when I do a backup it works on and on for a few hours, then suddenly stops with a couple of hundred files left to evaluate and some more to copy. I ran dmesg in the terminal and it says "fs_events: add_event: event queue is full! dropping events." in a lot of lines. I found this link http://www.nabble.com/Event-in-dmesg...-t2563691.html through google, and it seems like it is Spotlight that stops my backup.

After dmesg the whole mac froze and I had to force-reboot it. This has happened before, which is why I want SD to backup the disk so I can reinstall OS X. Maybe the problem has always been Spotlight, I haven't been able to isolate the crashings and understand why they come and go.

Now I would like to try to backup again. When trying yesterday night it also stopped after about 12gb being copied. I didn't investigate dmesg that time, but I guess it was Spotlights fault.

So: do you know how I disable Spotlight? I found a link http://www.sweetwater.com/expert-cen.../d--07/12/2006 but it seems a little to dangerous. Would it be enough to add /Volumes to the Spotlight list of places not to index?

Have you heard of anyone else having this problem?

No, haven't really heard of this. But you can add the destination volume to the Spotlight Preference Pane's "Privacy" tab: that should help.

Solved
 

On the fifth or sixth trial it finally worked. I would like to share this in case of anyone having the same problems as I had.

I was trying to backup my Powerbook disk onto a disk image on my external FW drive. The problem was that after evaluating/copying about 12-13 gb of the files to the disk image, first SD and then the whole computer would freeze (although mouse pointer would move). "cat /var/log/system.log" told me a lot of lines of "fs_events: add_event: event queue is full! dropping events.".

The error message seemed to come from a collision with Spotlight, so I disabled it.

Still, the backup would fail. I found a comment (scroll down to "Tiger is effected as well!" by "ktohg", Tue, Aug 9 '05 at 4:39PM PDT) and followed it, even though my problems weren't exactly the same:
sudo mv /Library/Caches /_Library_Caches
sudo reboot

And now I also chose "Repair permissions on Mac OS X" under Options, which I hadn't dared to touch after the Spotlight disabling, because of the last line "This can be reversed by repairing permissions.".

And suddenly the backup worked. I do not now if it was the Spotlight disabling (and then repairing permissions), or the /Library/Caches moving, or a combination of them, but somewhere in there is the solution. What I _do_ know is that it can't be the single "Repair permissions", because I was doing that on all trials until I disabled Spotlight.

Anyway, I hope this will help someone. And thanks for a great software! I'll use my Christmas money to register first thing in Januar; I would like to be able to use Smart Update as my primary backup plan after reinstalling OS X.