Time Machine has Slow Backups and Slows down the CPU

This isn't really a FCP tip per se, but I was editing -doing a favor which is another way to spell free- at someone's home recently helping them with a project and noticed after a while that their Time Machine back ups were taking forever; it seemed to be constantly running. It was using a bit of CPU and really thrashing a connected drive.

I checked the Console (Applications > Utilities > Console) and typed in "Starting standard backup" into the search box and looked at the times Time Machine had been running. Looking at the times between "Backup completed successfully" and "Starting standard backup" I saw that backups were taking near 50mins, meaning that Time Machine wasn't grinding away for only 10mins every hour.

I looked around a little bit and one thing to try to fix this, other than just turning it off as it's a problem from 10.6.x all the way to 10.8.x, is to perform a Safe Boot.

1. Reboot the Mac
2. Right after the Startup Chime (Bong noise) hold down the SHIFT key, this is called a Safe Boot
3. Wait for a while. You may see not only an Apple logo on the screen above a "Gear" wheel but below that you may see a progress bar as well. Keep holding down the SHIFT key
4. When it finishes booting (and log in if it asks you to) wait for it to settle down, don't launch any apps, then Reboot. This time don't hold down the SHIFT key.
5. Wait for Time Machine to run again or force it to run by selecting it from the menubar and selecting "Back Up Now"

In a backup or two you should see back ups moving along much faster. There's some complicated stuff going on here with UUID's and Deep Traversal but this is one quick thing to try to solve it before you delve into deleting backups or using another drive (which people often think fixes it but just starts a new backup which you could get by formatting your current Time Machine drive) or running repair utilities.

This process is for if you have a Time Machine back up drive directly connected to a Mac. I'm not sure how well or if at all, this would help a slow network backup.

Preference Manager Files

The new (version 2.0.3) Preference Manager backup tool from Digital Rebellion stores it's Final Cut backups as .pmb2 files which are simply "Directory" according to the File command. What this means is that you can access the files backed up simply by right-clicking on a .pmb2 file and selecting Show Package Contents.

I'm unsure how well these backups will transfer over email or via Windows systems, though.

One more quick note: if you try and use a / (slash) in a backup's name Preference Manger will not create a backup and not warn about it since / is an illegal character in OS X's file naming system.

For info about the old file format look here. Apparently your old backups are converted to the new package type automatically when you run the app for the first time.

Digital Rebellion's Preference Manager's File Format

Digital Rebellion has three handy bits of software for various things regarding Final Cut Studio. One, called Compressor Repair, helps keep QMaster running, another, FCS Remover, is essentially an uninstaller for Final Cut and the third, called Preference Manager, backs up and restores your Final Cut preferences.

Today, I had a call to fix someone's badly behaving FCP install and since they weren't exactly savvy to the inner workings of the Mac when I suggested they trash FCP's prefs they had no idea what to do. So, I began to walk them through the process when I decided to just have them download and use Preference Manager. Playing along at home so I could tell them exactly what to do I noticed in Preference Manager's preferences that it allowed you to choose the directory where the backups were kept. But they were archived in a strange type of file called a .pmb.

Wonderful, I thought, another proprietary file format to worry about. Immediately I decided I didn't like this and lamented the day that FCP Rescue went away. I decided to find out exactly what these .pmb files are and see if they're useful on their own.

I fired up the Terminal, typed in File, hit spacebar and dragged in a newly created .pmb file and hit return to find out it's actually nothing more than a simple "Zip archive data, at least v1.0 to extract" .zip file.

So, to make these .pmb files useful when you need one and don't have or don't want to use Preference Manager, just append .zip to the end of one and then double click it to unzip it and there are all of your copies of your backed-up preferences.

When Hard Drives Die

If you've never seen the heart-warming attempts of Disk Utility trying to fix a very sick hard drive here's your chance. Disk utility can fix most things but when a hard drive has a serious hardware failure then there isn't much it can do but it will give it it's best shot:

Verify and Repair disk “Storage 500G”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid node structure
Rebuilding Catalog B-tree.
Invalid node structure
Invalid record count
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid record count
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid record count
Rechecking volume.
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Missing thread record (id = 3869)
Missing thread record (id = 3954)
Missing thread record (id = 4298)
Incorrect number of thread records
Incorrect number of thread records
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Missing thread record (id = 3869)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 50 instead of 51)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 10 instead of 20)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 7 instead of 18)
Missing thread record (id = 4409)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 0 instead of 19)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 3 instead of 20)
Missing thread record (id = 3990)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 0 instead of 34)
Missing thread record (id = 4096)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 0 instead of 4)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 1056 instead of 1084)
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 26628 instead of 26949)
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Volume Bit Map needs minor repair
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume free block count
(It should be 49256844 instead of 49244276)
Repairing volume.
Missing directory record (id = 4298)
Missing directory record (id = 3954)
Look for missing items in lost+found directory.
Rechecking volume.
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Missing thread record (id = 4353)
Missing thread record (id = 4665)
Missing thread record (id = 4736)
Missing thread record (id = 4811)
Incorrect number of thread records
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 26714 instead of 26949)
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Repairing volume.
Missing directory record (id = 4811)
Missing directory record (id = 4736)
Missing directory record (id = 4665)
Missing directory record (id = 4353)
Look for missing items in lost+found directory.
Rechecking volume.
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 26949 instead of 26714)
The volume Storage 500G could not be repaired after 3 attempts.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
Repair attempted on 1 volume
1 volume could not be repaired

Check Your RAIDs

If you have a software mirrored RAID set up be sure to check it every once in a while. Since the data is mirrored you won't always know when one of your drives is sick or dying fast (if there's no noise, that is).

Hit Command + Shift + U to open the Utilities folder and tap D to highlight Disk Utility (you may need to Down Arrow to highlight it) then Command + O to open it.

Once it's open, highlight your RAID then click on the RAID button on the right and hope you don't see this:



If you do I recommend trying a few things first:

Reboot and check it again.
Unmount the RAID, Remount it then Check again.

If it still shows a failure, copy the good drive's data to another good drive and toss out the iffy one. There's no reason to try and "fix" it. You can never fully trust it again and this is the very reason you set up a RAID to begin with anyway - that if a disk fails you still have your data. So get another good drive, add it to the RAID and hit rebuild.



Just keep in mind that when you rebuild a RAID it takes a LOT longer than if you just copy the data over using the Finder. Plus if you rip the HD apart you can yank out the cool neodymium magnets inside and marvel at the technology.

Backing up things with Mozy.com

Final Cut Pro saves it's project files wherever you want it to. They can also get kinda big depending on the length and complexity of the project. There are all kinds of ways to automatically back up stuff on the Mac but one way I've come to really like is by using the free service provided by Mozy.com.

It's FREE 2+ Gig backup that runs automatically when you set it to. I have mine set to back up my FCP autosaves and my main project save files every night at 3am. To restore files it's as easy as hitting an item in your menubar or you can log in at their site and restore files.

What's great about Mozy is that it runs in the background, it's encrypted, they give you 2+ Gigs of room and it's FREE. Plus if you sign up using someone's referral number they get an extra 256MBs of storage for free.

Here's my referral number :)

One thing to be aware of is that the Mac Mozy client is still in beta. So far I haven't had any real trouble other than having to re-install it once but that was a few versions ago. Don't rely exclusively upon Mozy or any one backup solution, use at least two.

I for one, use Mozy, occasional CD/DVD data back up and dump save files to my portable flash drive.

One other quick method to back up files under 20MBs is to get a free Gmail account and mail them to yourself. Google archives everything forever it seems.