Time Machine and 10.8.4

Update (6/21/13).-- This fucking sucks as it did the 3+ hour backup twice today, once this morning and once this afternoon taking 50 GB's each time. I noticed slowly over the day with a lot of apps open, but not unusual for my work, the backup began taking longer between the two long backups.

To put in simple terms for Apple since they don't offer let alone provide users with debugging tools for this problem or access to the TC's HD to test it, except of course if you take to the Apple store where they can test it meaning the software tools exist, the TC backup software sucks!

Let's understand this problem started with OS-X 10.8.3. Under 10.8.2 it worked fine on my Mac. I'm open to suggestion to debug the problem beside just not using it. I don't think everyone has it, otherwise, Apple would fix it.

And the other options are to buy a new TC HD - this one is from 2008; buy and use another backup application - but none work with the TC; or use other backup software - which I'm doing with Integral's software for the overnight backups to a 2-TB LaCie HD.

The other option is use another HD for the backup. I have two old (2006 and 2008) HD's in an external box, so I could use one of those to test the backup software. That would require replacing the HD's in the box with newer larger ones to do the TC's backup of four 1-TB HD's.

Anyway, that's the story again. I turned the backup off and it's zero'ing the TC's HD. I don't know what I'll decide, and I'm open to suggestions or ideas.

Update (6/20/13).-- Apple didn't fix the backup software. For the third time in a week since starting it, the backup decided to backup of 50+ GB's of stuff I don't know what, but it's 3 hours of wasted time for each backup. The one today (6/20) happened only a little later in the morning than the first two and the same time as today

I have no clue about a cause because the first two times the computer was sitting idle when I was out of the office and the one yesterday and today I was downloading and installing some large applications. And there's no log or way to determine what the backup is actually doing besides looking at it afterward to see what it copied.

Another flaw with this bug in the backup is that being an hourly backup, it gets deleted in time but the space is not recovered by the backup to increase the available space left. It flags it used and doesn't use it until the TC runs out and has to reclaim space for a new backup. That's now 200+ GB out of use on the TC until it's full.

You would think with all the brains at Apple, this wouldn't be a problem and more so wouldn't continue to produce a bad application, but they do. Go figure.

Original Post.-- Well, after running OS-X 10.8.4 for awhile and restarted the Time Machine (TC) backup June 13th and  it took about 16 hours to do the full backup of HD (only HD and not HD2, 3 and 4 which I exclude). Then it behaved itself doing the hourly backup in 2-4 minutes, until the 15th (9 am to 12 pm) and today (9 am to 12 pm).

Yeah, today, though, two things happened almost simultaneously which I don't know if they're related other than coincidental. First the backup went off on one of it's 3-hour, 50 GB backups for no reason and about then Finder started taking snapshots of every folder on HD.

Yeah, the little menu bar show the Finder HDFolders automator action application running opening and closing a finder window of every folder on HD. The last time it did this it took over 8 hours of popping finder windows on the screen.

Very annoying. I killed this one about half way through and rebooted. Now the question is the TC backup, was this an anomaly or is it back to its old habit of losing track of itself. Apple updated the TC's firmware which I thought may have helped resolve the problem.

For now only time and the backups will tell. I'm not holding my breath anymore with Apple and their TC backups. The next option is to get rid of the TC, or better take the 1 TB HD out and put it in a HD box when and where I can actually look at the HD.

I'm running a Stardom twin HD box with the orginal PPC HD's (2006 and 2008, really) which are due for replacement (they're just 256 MB and 512 MB HD's), so putting the TC's 2008 1 TB HD in it is simple replacement. Or better, just buy two new HD's.

Anyway, that's the report to date. Apple's TC backup is iffy at best, which is why I have other backups running overnight.