Searching Time Machine Backups and Versions
Spotlight doesn’t currently appear able to search Time Machine backups reliably, at least not in Sequoia or Tahoe, although this may not be universal.
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If I now step back through my backups to reach one that I know contains that file, I can restore it. But if I type anything into the search field, nothing is found. If I change the scope of the search to that backup, the window title changes but its contents remain blank, and there isn’t even a busy spinner to indicate a search is in progress.
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As I can’t disable Spotlight indexing on that volume without macOS telling me that it’s required to be indexed by Spotlight, neither can I force that volume to be reindexed.
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My conclusion is that using Spotlight to search Time Machine backups no longer works, and the instructions given by Apple are also broken.
That has been my experience, too. As I see it, there are four separate problems:
- I want to be able to search all my backup snapshots, because I don’t know which one might contain the file I want to restore. Time Machine only lets you search one at a time.
- Searching an individual snapshot doesn’t actually work.
- Spotlight indexing is invasive, using lots of CPU time, and with spinning hard drives causes wear and tear and creates lots of noise. If search doesn’t work anyway, I’d like to turn it off, but macOS won’t let me.
- If the problem is with the index, there’s no way to reset it without deleting your backup.
Unfortunately, all those saved versions in the version database fall outside the scope of Spotlight indexing, and Spotlight search can’t look inside any of the old versions saved in a volume’s version database. Surprisingly, the version browser doesn’t offer any search facilities either, as that’s presumably another feature intended for a future that never came.
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One way around this is to save each document version as a separate file, allow Spotlight to extract their contents and add those to its indexes for that volume, then to search those files. This is quick and simple using my free utility Versatility.
Previously:
- Golden Gate Spotlight
- Time Machine in Tahoe
- Runaway Spotlight With Pages Document on iCloud Drive
- Spotlight Indexing Running Wild
- Invasive Spotlight Indexing
- You Can’t Turn Off Spotlight on Your Time Machine Backup
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Same experience here. It’s bad enough that Time Machine can take many hours to do a single incremental backup, but it adds real insult to injury when it then spends the next day or two re-indexing all those backed-up files, for no apparent purpose since you can’t search them anyway.
Worse, macOS appears to have some kind of kernel bug which causes I/O to completely unrelated disks to be severely throttled when a Time Machine disk is being read or written heavily. Such as by 20 copies of spotlight indexer. When Time Machine is backing up or being indexed, I basically can’t use my computer.
I’m just so *sick* of these huge bugs in basic features. Just the bare minimum things like search don’t even work.
I feel like I’m back on Windows, have to restart all the time because the system just crumbles after a few days. Terrible user interface. An operating system that’s so complex, kludgy and messy that not even Apple’s engineers know what’s going on with it
I hope golden gate will be an improvement but it never should’ve gotten this bad in the first place. It’s a mess.
Time Machine should be next on Apple's polish and re-focus agenda, with a possible re-implementation and/or substantial upgrade.
Since around Time Capsule's retirement it feels like it has been on the ignore list, despite having many issues.
My guess is that Apple thought that introducing 'iCloud Documents and Data' syncing would in some ways make Time Machine redundant... but that is cloud storage, not backup.
Why Apple hasn't introduced native cloud backup to Time Machine is puzzling. They could really juice their iCloud storage revenue by supporting it natively.
In essence they could sell a high-margin Apple Time Machine cloud backup service based upon re-selling Amazon's lower margin AWS S3 Glacier back-end storage.
I thought I had a bug in my app because metadata I populate using MDMetaData… APIs wasn’t showing up. Then I realized that metadata wasn’t working in Finder either. spotlight just kind of shut down and took a shit.
Then I realized I somehow got like 5 gb of Free disk space left. 300 GB of “System Data.” Wtf. Then I reboot. Still no good. I delete a few files including those mentioned in the “Spotlight Index running wild” post (but the system did not report large file sizes for any of these files/folders). So I deleted nothing that accounts for more than like maybe 1-2 gb of data. Five minutes go by and poof….150 gb of system data disappears and things start working again.
Not sure if related but sparse files seems to throw Finder size calculations.
What the fuck is going on. Where are they hiding these files? This UX is unacceptable. How do you fucking fill the user’s disk and not show them what the content is? I’m not sending you a fucking sysdiagnose but if you show me the System data i will file a bug report and tell you what the problem is.
So in what way exactly is Time Machine better than it was before? Say, before it changed over to APFS? Or even compared to its first release?
@Bri Snapshot-based backups are faster to create, and backups are only the (AFAIK) incremental byte changes *within* files, not the entire files themselves.
The downside is you can't delete all historical backups of a specific file or folder, like you could in the HFS+ Hardlink days.
