How to fix slow Spotlight and Time Machine after upgrading to  10.7.5? Since updating to 10.7.5 both Spotlight and Time Machine are very slow.


To index a normal system drive Spotlight calculates to need several days.
As a result Time Machine takes up to an hour or more for an incremental backup of ~100 Mib.


What solution is there for these slow Time Machine backups and Spotlight indexing?
I posted this workaround in that topic. Here it is (it is not a solution, only a temporary workaround to let my backup and Spotlight work until a fix is released).

Using Terminal:


I disabled Spotlight indexing:

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

I deleted Spotlight index in all my drives (including the backup drives):

sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1 /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2  /.Spotlight-V100/VolumeConfiguration.plist

sudo rm -rf /TimeMachineDrive/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1 /TimeMachineDrive/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2  /TimeMachineDrive/.Spotlight-V100/VolumeConfiguration.plist 



(rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100/* did not work for me.) (This can also be done by excluding the whole drive using privacy setting of Spotlight and then reincluding it.)


I deleted /var/folders content (see this topic to know why):

sudo rm -rf /var/folders/*

I deleted the .inProgress files from my Backups.backupdb subfolders (put to trash then empty the trash is the only way to do this).


It may be necessary to reformat your backup drive instead of only deleting .inProgress files.


I rebooted and then I restarted Spotlight:

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

sudo mdutil -i on -E /

I waited until Spotlight finished indexing process
I launched a new backup using TimeMachine
I opened a bugreport to Apple with the title: "TimeMachine hangs when Spotlight is in use under Mac OS X 10.7" praying that many other people will do the same to make this bug a priority.


Some steps may be useless, but I took all what I learn by reading different topic about slow TM and Spotlight.