Constant Beachballing with Time Machine

[parkov]

When I start up Time Machine, it beachballs the system and makes it unusable for several hours. Firing up Console gives me these errors every ten seconds for basically the entire duration. There are some other errors peppered in there too. Any ideas how to fix this?

5/12/08 6:03:34 PM com.apple.launchd[129] (com.apple.ReportCrash[1431]) posix_spawn("/System/Library/CoreServices/ReportCrash", ...): Resource temporarily unavailable
5/12/08 6:03:34 PM com.apple.launchd[129] (com.apple.ReportCrash[1431]) Exited with exit code: 1
5/12/08 6:03:34 PM com.apple.launchd[129] (com.apple.ReportCrash) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

 

[NAG]

Can you give some more details about your setup? What kind of drive, how you're connected to the drive, os version, stuff like that.

 

[parkov]

The computer is a MacBook C2D 2.0 GHz / 4 GB RAM / 10.5.2.

The external drive is a Fantom 80 GB connected via FireWire.

I don't keep it connected 24/7, so the first time it syncs after being disconnected, it says "Preparing Backup" for awhile. During this time, the computer is completely unusable.

 

[NAG]

Well, yeah, it is prepping the backup so that will take a bit.

 

[parkov]

So it is normal for the computer to be unusable for more than two hours as it preps the backup?

 

[gnasher729]

So it is normal for the computer to be unusable for more than two hours as it preps the backup?

It's normal if one of the two hard drives involved has hardware problems Start "Activity Monitor" before you start the backup, and switch its display to "Disk Activity". If everything is fine, you should see tons of disk activity (hundreds of reads and writes per second, a process called backupsomething taking lots of CPU time, numbers changing all the time), so this will slow down your Mac a bit, but it should be perfectly usable. If that doesn't happen then either your internal or external drive is likely to have some problems.

I would recommend that you try to borrow a different external drive to make a Time Machine backup, in case it is your backup drive that has the problems. If that has the same problems, then it is likely that your internal drive is at fault. Make a complete backup (Disk Utility should let you just copy the complete internal drive to the external drive), and then you might consider replacing the drive. For a MacBook that is quite easy (MacBook Pro on the other hand is a bit difficult), and a bigger drive than your current one isn't too expensive.