They finally fixed Time Machine indexing

[vitamanic]

Anyone else notice that external TM drives no longer get forced into reindexing after a reboot now?

Prior to Ventura, anyone with a mechanical Time Machine drive would have to listen to it get thrashed for hours after a reboot because macOS forced a full reindexing after every fresh boot for no apparent reason. Mine has over 3TB of TM data on it and the indexing would take 3+ hours EVERY TIME I REBOOTED. Oof.

Now with Ventura, it seemingly fires up the mds process to verify the existing index for 30 seconds or so and then leaves it alone afterwards.

Figured I'd share this cool undocumented change.

 

[Realityck]

Although I don't use Time Machine, the spotlight indexing is well behaved now on Ventura compared to Monterey.

Siri & Spotlight settings on Mac

On your Mac, use Siri & Spotlight settings to turn on and choose options for Siri and change the categories that appear in Spotlight search results.

support.apple.com

 

[MisterSavage]

I'm still on Monterey and luckily I haven't hit that with my two external TM drives.

 

[vitamanic]

I'm still on Monterey and luckily I haven't hit that with my two external TM drives.

Are you using an external SSD or mechanical? I imagine an SSD gets through the indexing in minutes compared to hours with a mechanical.

When it was bothering me a year ago, the research I did said it was expected behavior between Spotlight and TM.

 

[MisterSavage]

Are you using an external SSD or mechanical? I imagine an SSD gets through the indexing in minutes compared to hours with a mechanical.

When it was bothering me a year ago, the research I did said it was expected behavior between Spotlight and TM.

I've got an external G-Drive (HDD) and also a portable HDD. I really only reboot for OS updates usually.

 

[Brian33]

Anyone else notice that external TM drives no longer get forced into reindexing after a reboot now?

Prior to Ventura, anyone with a mechanical Time Machine drive would have to listen to it get thrashed for hours after a reboot because macOS forced a full reindexing after every fresh boot for no apparent reason.

Thank you for posting this. On Monterey I'm very unhappy with the wear and tear on my hard disk drives due to reindexing of entire TM volumes. I don't reboot very often, but it's still a lot of disk activity.

Your post gives me some bittersweet hope for the future. Bittersweet because Apple won't let me upgrade my two 2015 Macs to Ventura -- they're stuck on Monterey. (I'm not anxious to try some hack like OCLP.)

:-(

So no real fix for these two very useful machines, but it is good to know Apple did finally address the issue.

 

[MacGizmo]

I don't recall ever running into this particular issue with Monterey and my external drives—though I have SSDs, so I probably wouldn't have noticed if it was reindexing.