Don't use Time Machine!

Here's my tale of woe. I have an iomega 500GB drive that I designated as my Time Machine drive. Everything went fine during installation.
Then:
1. Everything slowed down to a minor crawl at first, but a major crawl later
2. Programs began to launch with too many bounces.
3. My curser turned into the spinning ball of the undead but only when I put it on my desktop
4. At this point I was able to launch any program, except finder to see my files (nothing trivial). And as long as I kept my cursor within the parameters of the file interface, I was able to reach the top menu and force quit the program I was working with, because half of the time - the program itself would freeze up. Relaunching Finder did nothing.
5. Then everything froze up, unable to launch any thing, spinning ball everywhere and I was *not even able to turn off my machine!* I had to press the button on the front of my G5 to shut down!
6. I backed up and wiped my hard drive, reinstalled everything, except that I said no to the question of using my outboard drive for Time Machine.
Since then, I keep Time Machine turned off, and everything seems to be running fine, a bit slow in some areas. but that's to be expected on .0 of new software. So I put the source of blame at the feet of Time Machine, because it screws with the base of Apples GUI... Finder.

jdelima wrote:
You're possibly being a little melodramatic in warning everyone off TM because you have had an issue. There are plenty of people who do not have issues, and those who have different issues.
Can you confirm that TM is actively using your drive when things grind to a halt? You haven't specifically mentioned drive access in your assessment of the issues. If not, then how can you be sure it is TM causing problems? Have you tried something as simple as turning TM off and seeing if it fixes things? A rebuild is an extreme step to take for a feature you can turn off!
Can you afford to turn it back on to test and shed some light on it for others who may have similar issues?
First, allow me to state that TM (over time) caused a complete and total lock up of my machine, so bad that I had to hold the button in to power it down at the end of the ordeal. This is not melodrama. It is a warning. If you're not having trouble, then good on you. Most importantly, this is my experience. If you want to open a thread saying "I Love TM", feel free to do so.
Now, due to TM's clockwork facility in backing up on the hour, testing the programs and Finder while TM was accessing the HD was really quite simple. This is what I did when it was getting bad: When ever a scheduled back up was about to happen, I would open Logic 8 (and other programs) - 5-10 minutes before hand and start recording (or other things - see below). At the appointed time, according to my clock, Logic froze dead in the water and displayed the spinning ball of joy. I tried this with the latest and greatest edition of Itunes - same results. With opening humongous 600dpi pictures from Adobe Bridge CS3 - same results I picked these three to show the least (Itunse) taxing to the most taxing on my machine (Logic and CS3 Bridge). All of this testing was done before, during and after the "backup". In the meantime (when I could) I saw the Activity Monitor spiking red like I've never seen it before.
And yes, I turned it on and off to see if it made a difference?! I believe that I mentioned wiping my dive only after all other avenues have been explored. I don't like to spend a day re-installing all of the software I own unless it's absolutely necessary.
And no, I'm sorry I can't turn it back on to help other people out. I'm sorry for that, really I am, But this is a semi-production machine (for my small studio), and I really can't afford to be a test monkey for Apple. When they fix TM in 5.1, I will turn it on and rejoice in it's greatness. In the meantime I will continue to back up the old fashioned way.

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