News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

July 2, 2008

troubleshooting

No, not now, stop

Posted Jul. 2, ’08, 7:08 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Troubleshooting

Sync Menu Since upgrading to Leopard, there’s one thing that’s really got on my nerves with my Mac Pro. Time Machine and .Mac sync have a habit of kicking in at the worst times, driving my hard disk to the limit. I can hear the heads flying across my disk in a desperate attempt to save my data in case of the worst and try to match my data up to my other Macs.

That would be all right, except that when other applications want to retrieve some disk data or the system requires the use of some virtual memory, things grind to a halt. It seems that neither Time Machine or .Mac sync will yield to anything else. When you’re playing a video game of some kind, it becomes really annoying. It’s to the point now that I reflexively search the menu bar for their menu item and choose “Stop Backup” and “Cancel Sync”.

Have any of you had similar experiences with these two features? Time Machine I can understand using the disk heavily, but .Mac sync never seemed that greedy in versions past.


6 Comments

krye said:

No

July 2, 2008 7:13 AM
Brian Author Profile Page said:

I detach my Time Machine drive when it comes time to game. I'd rather not have to think about canceling anything.

I don't run .Mac, so I can't comment there, but WoW definitely felt it when Time Machine would kick in, and I don't always have time in a raid to stop the backup, so I pre-empt it. ;)

July 2, 2008 8:02 AM
Patrick said:

I haven't had a problem with Time Machine's hard disk access slowing down my other tasks. I don't use .Mac.

On WoW, I could hear when Time Machine kicked in, but didn't notice any performance degradation. Of course I was usually wandering around lost in some forest, which doesn't require a lot of computing power.

Is your Time Machine disk external, and is that external disk used for anything other than Time Machine?

July 2, 2008 8:55 AM
Aaron said:

Mere moments ago I changed my sync preferences from automatically to daily to keep this from happening.
Annoys the crap out of me.

July 2, 2008 9:16 AM
Kevin Miles said:

I myself turn back up off if there is going to be something I am doing that Time Machine would interfere with. I can't see anything would need to be backed up while playing a game. If you are doing something that you don't need a backup for simply turn backups off and then when you are done turn it back on.

Of course you are then at he mercy of remembering to turn it back on or risk not backing up till you do.

As for.Mac and Syncing. I do that manually or I will do it daily so that its not causing a problem.

July 2, 2008 1:15 PM
Khürt Williams Author Profile Page said:

Yes. It's fracking annoying.

July 7, 2008 9:45 AM

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