sdbackupbytime?

[Dan Lester]

I believe, over the years, there has been some discussion about this, but ...

Most of my backups are automatic. In the wee hours of the morning, when I can't monitor them. But every month or so, I do a special manual backup. Today, I did one. The backup was successful, and completed, according to SuperDuper but, after that, the disk and OS was VERY busy for many minutes on what Console told me was sdbackupbytime activity.

Um. Whazzat?

Eventually, everyone is happy, and the disk activity ceases. But when a backup is formally completed, according to SuperDuper, do I have to wait for everyone to be happy? Or can I just unmount the disk while it sounds like it is working hard? After SuperDuper SAYS it is done, it's apparently not.

[dnanian]

sdbackupbytime does not do disk activity, so I don't think that was it. The activity was either Spotlight or an antivirus program.

If you have sample logging from that, though, send it in to the support email.

[Dan Lester]

Ah, OK. Thank you. So the frantic disk activity wasn't connected to the frantic OS activity with sdbackupbytime that was being reported on Console. But that's ALL that Console was reporting. If it was Spotlight activity, wouldn't that show up on Console as well?

I don't use Spotllght, and I have unchecked all the "categories" in Spotlight prefs. So I was presuming that Spotlight wasn't indexing anything. I guess to disable Spotlight indexing entirely I have to get rid of /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist. I will do that.

But out of curiosity, what exactly is sdbackupbyime doing at the end of a backup?

[dnanian]

sdbackupbytime is doing nothing after a backup that's different than what it does normally. If you're seeing differently, I'd need to see the logging.

Basically, it's the daemon that's managing time-based backups, sleep management, etc.

[Dan Lester]

Whoa. OK. So the frantic activity of sdbackupbytime didn't even have anything to do with the disk backup I just did? By that token, I guess the answer to my question is that sure, when the backup is complete, feel free to dismount the backup disk, even though sdbackupbytime is busy. I had mistakenly assumed that having just done a backup with SuperDuper, activity on the backup disk was due to SuperDuper, and sdbackupbytime activity pertained to that backup disk. Confusing!

Previous forum posts were complaining about sdbackupbytime hogging the system. That wasn't what I was concerned with, and I presume that those original problems with sdbackupbytime were fixed.

[dnanian]

Again, I don't know what "frantic activity" in this case means, Dan. I'd really need to see the logging...but I can say for sure it had nothing to do with the drive being 'busy'.