MacOS – Time machine freezes mac

Since more than one application is having issues, it's unlikely to be two bugs and more likely to be a system or hardware issue.

Before spending a lot of time, make a new user and see if that user has issues as well. You could have bad luck and lots of corruption in your user folder and this will let you know if the problem is with the apps/system/hardware or not.

Drive Genius might help to run more involved tests, but it might be cheaper to just buy a spare external drive and back things up. You can zero the drive and clear all bad blocks - give that hardware the best chance to work again. You will know soon after restoring your data on the newly erased and installed mac if the problem is resolved.

Good Luck!

If the Users directory on the SSD is the same, ie., you haven't changed files, etc., then it is still the Users directory that the OS is using. However, if you did some terminal magic to make this transition I could see where things would get a bit hairy.

I'm not as familiar with the terminal, but I can tell you what I would do in this situation. I'd clone disk images of each drive to the TB using Carbon Copy Cloner or some similar piece of software. At least as a disk image you'll maintain the integrity of the files - I'm not sure how this is effected via encryption though. It may not even work.

Ideally, you'd reinstall OS X on the SSD and then use your Terminal magic to move the Users directory to the HD - if that is still your plan - mount the disk image files and move files accordingly, this should help with permissions. Again, I'm not sure how the encryption works into this either. And I've not seen many instances where moving the Users directory didn't result in some kind of mess. If you can keep it on the drive with the system, I think that would be best.

BTW - Lion should've installed it's recovery partition locally when you did the original install.

Perhaps not much help - but some things to think about.