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-   -   Time Machine Issue with Restored Clone (https://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6719)

sdsl 10-14-2012 12:17 AM

Time Machine Issue with Restored Clone
 
Recently, my wife's 2008 iMac (10.6.8 OS) showed "failing" S.M.A.R.T. when its internal drive was examined with Disk Utility. I had made (a) a SuperDuper clone, and (b) Time Machine backups. Also, when "verify" and "repair" were run, no repairs were necessary. No error messages were generated from either the cloning operation nor from Time Machine. Time Machine hourly updates typically were done in about 1 minute.

Booting from the clone, the clone appeared to be valid. Programs and settings and files looked the same as the original.

The internal drive on the iMac was then replaced. I erased the new internal drive and cloned back to it from the Super Duper clone. Everything appeared identical to the way it was before the original internal was replaced. Time Machine immediately did a full backup, no doubt the new internal drive looked "different", like it hadn't been backed up before.

That first big Time Machine backup took a normal amount of time for 150 GB (about 2 hours), but subsequent Time Machine runs (hourly) were taking about an hour to backup just a few tens of MB (several hundred thousand files it claimed for each hourly run!). So basically, Time Machine backups were running without stop.

After some research on this, I deleted the hidden file fseventd on the internal hard drive (which had been cloned back from the clone). After doing this, Time Machine backups returned to taking about ~ 1 minute for several thousand files, much less than the hundreds of thousands of files (still just ~ 20 MB) which were previously hanging up Time Machine and making it run non stop.

My question for SuperDuper is: after cloning, replacing the internal drive, then cloning back, the only behavior of the computer that had changed seemed to be the small hourly Time Machine backups going from ~ 1 minute to up to an hour or longer. Is this fseventsd file among the hidden files cloned back and forth? When I deleted it, Time Machine immediately did a "deep traversal" and Time Machine backups then returned to normal. I have restored a few files to check and at least from spot checks, Time Machine seems to be doing good backups. I do plan to continue doing SuperDuper clones in addition to Time Machine.

I'm willing to accept small unexplained anomalies like this during a full internal disk replacement (which went very smoothly overall, actually, using the clone approach), but wondered if there are any known oddities with SuperDuper and this hidden fseventsd file. This fseventsd file (it's actually a folder) is apparently used to figure out what files have changed and need to be backed up with Time Machine. When it was deleted, a "deep traversal" was done to create a new one and subsequent Time Machine backups took just ~ 1 minute as they originally had.

dnanian 10-14-2012 08:06 AM

We don't copy fsevents...it makes no sense to do so.

sdsl 10-14-2012 01:28 PM

You're right, it would make no sense to copy that file/folder, but I just wanted to check in case I was missing something. It seems that fseventsd somehow got corrupted on the new disk and recreating it fixed the problem. Had nothing to do with SuperDuper, thanks for confirming that.

I have been doing clones and backups for years in case of the event that a disk failed. So far, I have only used these clones to restore an occasional file that was accidentally deleted. So a disaster finally happened and the restoration of the SuperDuper clone on the new replacement hard drive was simple and fast.

dnanian 10-14-2012 08:18 PM

Glad it worked well for you!


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