[Macpartners] next steps Time Machine / Spotlight debugging?

[Aran M Parillo]

Dear MacPartners,

I'm assisting a 10.8 user with a Time Machine backup issue with some Spotlight wonkiness thrown in. :-)

The user received a new machine in May.  We utilized migration assistant to setup, repaired permissions, and subsequently inherited the old machine's backup without issue.

For a couple of weeks, the machine has successfully backed up incrementally but more recently the user asked me for help because the Time Machine was reporting it had not backed up for some days.

Upon close inspection (watching the console) the backup will launch, correctly maps the backup volume, determines the files to backup and finds plenty of space, but then backup hangs at anywhere from 15KB to 15MB.  Eventually it will time out.

The time capsule hardware is new this year and I can enter time machine, browse through backup sets from the current and previous machine, so it does not appear to be a hardware issue there.

The user pointed out to me that spotlight seems to be in eternal index mode, so I used the spotlight privacy preference pane to attempt to rebuild the indexes.  Upon allowing spotlight to reindex, that process seems to hang at estimating indexing time.

So, at this point, any suggestions on what I can do to get spotlight sorted and backups on track?  I'll do some reading but as there have been problems with these two bits of software in past versions of os x, I'm seeing more noise than signal.

Please note: we would prefer to employ a solution that does not require us to reformat the backup data drive.

Thank you kindly for your thoughts here.
Aran
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