Spotlight corruption and cloning?
 

Hi Folks,
I have been using SD for a while now, quite successfully, thank you. Mostly I use it to make a complete backup of my boot drive. When Tiger first came out with spotlight, it was corrupting backups using Carbon Copy Cloner because Spotlight was running in the background. The practice was to put all drives being cloned into the private folder in spotlight which would keep them from being indexed. I have continued that practice with SD just to be safe, but every time I do, all indexes are destroyed and have to be rebuilt when I remove the disks from privacy mode.

I am wondering if this practice is no longer necessary with SD and Tiger 1.4.2. It makes me hesitant to back up as often as I should.

Thanks
Jeff

BTW, I found a nice little search program called Fox Trot, by makers of Powermail, that I think is faster and better than Spotlight. http://www.foxtrot.ch/

I'm not sure what you mean by Spotlight was "corrupting" backups. I certainly haven't seen that in my experience. Could you elaborate?

In SD! 1.5.5, we copy the Spotlight database from the source volume to the destination, where it's automatically rebuilt (because the volumes are different). But, indexing isn't disabled during the backup, so it can move more slowly than it would otherwise. In v2.0, we disable indexing during copy, and re-enable it after (as well as the privacy setting), but the index will be rebuilt (automatically) if enabled.

No corruption, though...

From MacFixit.
 

When does v. 2 come out? I have 1.5.5.

"Disable Spotlight for backup target volumes Users should disable Spotlight for backup target volumes (by using the "Privacy" tab of the Spotlight pane in System Preferences) before beginning the backup process to prevent live indexing as the files are copied.

Failing to do so can result in failed backups, significant performance issues, and other problems.

MacFixIt reader Thomas reports one such issue when using Retrospect to perform a routine backup:

"When trying to create my first bootable backup since installing Tiger, Retrospect stalled in the middle of the action with several errors.

"I concluded that Spotlight was indexing the clone-partition while it was written. When Retrospect wants to copy the files it finds newer versions already present that it can not overwrite because they are 'in use.' This appalls Retrospect so much - it doesn't even want to finish the rest of the

"So I used the Privacy-Tab of Spotlight's preferences to kick the backup-drive out of Spotlights universe - and the [Duplicate]-process went fine and complete this time.""

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?...50606093407384

From MacFixit.
 

When does v. 2 come out? I have 1.5.5.


http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?...50606093407384

"Disable Spotlight for backup target volumes Users should disable Spotlight for backup target volumes (by using the "Privacy" tab of the Spotlight pane in System Preferences) before beginning the backup process to prevent live indexing as the files are copied.

Failing to do so can result in failed backups, significant performance issues, and other problems.

MacFixIt reader Thomas reports one such issue when using Retrospect to perform a routine backup:

"When trying to create my first bootable backup since installing Tiger, Retrospect stalled in the middle of the action with several errors.

"I concluded that Spotlight was indexing the clone-partition while it was written. When Retrospect wants to copy the files it finds newer versions already present that it can not overwrite because they are 'in use.' This appalls Retrospect so much - it doesn't even want to finish the rest of the

"So I used the Privacy-Tab of Spotlight's preferences to kick the backup-drive out of Spotlights universe - and the [Duplicate]-process went fine and complete this time.""

OK, there's a huge difference between corruption and "errors"... stopping Spotlight from indexing during backup is something we do, as I said, in v2.0. You can, of course, do that yourself with the Privacy pane, too...

v2.0 will be released when it's done. We're pretty close.

From Memory
 

I had to search macfixit archives. I remember that there was also a problem with actual corruption of data early on in Tiger with CCC. Couldn't find the exact post. However, it made me very cautious about cloning and Spotlight.

I understand, but given my experience with Spotlight -- and knowing a bit about how the importers work -- I don't think corruption is something you need to worry about. You might encounter a failed copy (or deletion/replacement), but that's about it.