Right. Backup volumes will be in the Privacy tab, and things should work fine in 10.4.3 and later.

Restored volumes will have their state maintained too, so they should be enabled (or whatever state they're in at the time of restore). If restored with Disk Utility it might end up in the Privacy panel -- just drag it out, and all will be well.

I don't think they fixed all the various privacy panel issues with 10.4.2, but it's possible they did. Give it a try -- if the drive stays in Privacy, even across a reboot or disconnect/reconnect, without SD! involved -- it will work.

Thanks Dave.

Spotlight still seems to be slowing down our backups under Tiger.

It is taking almost 40 minutes to fully clone a 13GB volume under Tiger, whereas cloning a larger volume on Panther takes less than 20 minutes.

Prior to updating to 10.4.3 I had added my backup volumes to the Spotlight privacy tab. Should I have added them again after updating to 10.4.3?? (which you had said fixes issues with the privacy tab...)

Or do backups just take longer on with Tiger?

You should ensure they're in there, yes -- are they?

They are listed in the Spotlight Privacy list.

So, we're preserving that state, and Spotlight *shouldn't* be indexing the drive. Interesting...

Is there a way that I can confirm that Spotlight is in-fact indexing the drive while the backup is taking place?

Maybe some command or tell-tale sign that would specifically indicate that Spotlight is indexing the target as it is being written (other than the long backup time)?

Because, on 10.4.2 the backup would take longer than expected and then after it was completed there would be disk activity on the target disk (which I assume was Spotlight finishing its indexing)

Now with 10.4.3 the backup takes just as long, but there does not seem to be the disk activity after the clone is completed...

Well, I'd expect you to see the "dot" in the magnifying glass blinking, or something similar. What's weird is that we turn off indexing completely for the destination during the copy, and then we turn it back on again when we're done. It shouldn't be indexing at all.

Hmmm.
I will have to investigate this further...
Perhaps it's not a Spotlight issue after all...!

I will report back in this thread in a few days.

Hm. Please do: I'll be interested in what you find.

I'm still not sure what I'll be looking for, except a drastic speed boost in backup time, or for the Spotlight icon to be flashing during/after backup.

The flashing (just a dot in the magnifying glass) would typically indicate something's happening during the backup, though not necessarily the drive...

Do you do a permission repair before backing up (Options)? If so, try turning that off, too.

Well, I haven't been able to make a definitive determination that it is (or isn't) Spotlight that is causing our backups to take such a long time.

I will just use Smart Update from now on to make things a bit faster...

Is there something about Tiger that makes backups take longer than on 10.3.x?
Are there more small system files, or does the existence of meta-data, etc make the process inherently slower?

No, but Spotlight monitors every file access and can take time to do so. Try booting in Safe boot (hold down Shift during power on, and leave it down all the way to the desktop) to disable spotlight entirely -- that might tell you that it's causing your trouble.

more on Spotlight
 

slightly related issue...

I've run SD201 to backup/image OSX1039 volumes on a FW external that normally gets attached to an iBook running OSX143.

The partitions were NOT added to Spotlight's privacy Tab prior to backup. Should they have been?

I'm ready to Smart Update these volumes again, so what steps must been taken, if any, regarding this indexing issue before proceeding? (or, to ensure integrity of the backup set, must i erase/re-backup these volumes with them added to Privacy first?)

george