Alan, on 28 October 2012 - 06:49 AM, said:
I was about to run Techtool Pro on my external drive for the first time and I thought I would delete a few of the earliest time Machine backups to make the work of Techtool faster, because it can take a long time to defrag etc. The idea (of running TTP) being to speed up Time Machine. Now I realize the folly of this idea, but when I did it it seemed like a good idea. : (
I was doing this on my wife's laptop MBP 216 Ghz Intel Core Duo running 10.6.8 with 4 Gb 667 Mhz DDR2 SDRAM. The external HD is a 500 GB Griffen FW.
The internal HD has 3.9 GB of space left and I am unable to delete the Backup files from the trash and unable to transfer them back to the external HD from where they came. I get a dialogue box that says "The operation can't be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code - 8003)". I get the option of "Stop" or "Continue".
What are my options?
There are some suggestions listed in this article:
http://reviews.cnet....020873-263.html
In section 2, you're only interested in the last command shown.
sudo rm -rf /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/.Trashes
Replace the "Macintosh\ HD" with the name of your external drive. Precede any spaces in the name with backslashes. And it's probably a good idea to disable Time Machine for the duration of this task.
In case you don't understand *why* this idea was folly: Unless you're in the habit of making manual changes to the disk, there's no reason a Time Machine drive should exhibit any noticeable amount of fragmentation in the first place. The free space in particular shouldn't be fragmented. I think in your case I'd take a step back and take a closer look at the motivation. What makes you want Time Machine to be faster? It it taking a really exceptionally long time, or is it taking an acceptable amount of time but having an unacceptable impact on the system performance, or is it just a matter of principle?
If it's taking longer than you think it should, you might want to use a program like Backup Loupe (
http://www.soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe/) to make sure that what you should be backed up is. Perhaps you'll find large, frequently changing files that aren't critical. Perhaps there's a folder you meant to exclude but forgot.
If the system impact is a problem...well, I'm not sure what to say. I've *seen* it, but it's a relatively rare problem and I don't know what causes it. My Core 2 Duo mini works fine with a FW drive. My mother's somewhat newer machine works fine with a USB 2 device. My wife's Core i7 notebook with SSD (and the Core 2 Duo that preceded it) are terrible going to multiple drives with each of those interfaces. Barely usable while TM is running, so she just does it manually after she's done each day.
If you just want it faster on the grounds that it "should be" faster despite not really impacting you in any noticeable way.... I've got no help there, either. Basically I'd consider that a fool's errand.
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