Time Machine Woos

Photo by sebastiaan stam on Unsplash

Time Machine suppose to be effortless. Problem is, if you don’t fit what time machine expects, the behind the scene stuff will bite you. Recently, I notice Mac’s metadata service related process kept running.

Using this command :

sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys mds

I see that it’s reading tons of stuff from NAS which Time Machine backs up to. It’s reading those old backups. Some discussion on this. MDS is spotlight related process, it reads and index files.

Maybe it’s something to do slow network storage being on the slower side, but nevertheless, it’s taking cpu cycle doing stuff that I don’t see benefit. And every 1 hour, TM cause cpu spike during backup. Although one can use Time Machine Editor to customize TM schedule.

For my purpose, I just need to have a copy of my home directory, so this constant indexing of files and slowing down machine just aren’t worth it.

Conclusion

So at the end, the solution was to disable Time Machine backup which stop almost all mds process. I ended up using Arq backup which is a straight forward backup application: setup source directory(home dir), setup credential on NAS and mount the destination, set backup schedule either interval or set time and done! No more sudden slow down or super loud fan noise.