MacOS – Time Machine sparsebundle mounting problems

macosmountsparsebundletime-machine

Problem

I have a Time Machine backup which contains a lot of valuable information and I'm trying to access it. What's the problem? I'm trying to mount it and nothing1 happens.

  1. Nothing happens? So I tried to eject the network disk containing the sparsebundle and I got an error saying:

"The disk backups couldn't be ejected because finder it using it"

What??? My guess is DiskImageMounter is mounting but is ridiculously slow?

Notes / Updates

Note: installd is eating up my CPU usage, is this in anyway related to DiskImageMounter

Note 2: If I go to "Browse Other Backup Disks" it finds the sparsebundle but none of the backups show.

Update: Seems like mds is going crazy on the backup drive. I'll try to disable spotlight and see what I can do

There must surely be a better way to browse a Time Machine backup on a network disk

If not, how can my problem be fixed?

Best Answer

It's not Time Machine, or anything

It's Spotlight. How?

Spotlight

Spotlight indexes everything. Even on an external disk. My backup .sparsebundle was > 2 TB. My computer can't handle this. Spotlight would index everything before it showed in finder.

Debugging

First, to see what was using the disk. Run:

sudo lsof | grep /Volumes/<Volume Name>

I got something like:

diskimage 519           vihan    4r      mds

and about 4 of those. That meant Spotlight was going haywire.

Disabling

Disabling spotlight is simple. RUN THIS BEFORE TOUCHING THE .SPARSEBUNDLE

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

That should disable Spotlight. Now you can double click the .sparsebundle and continue as from this answer

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