Mavericks Time Machine stops halfway and weird mds errors

Question

Ever since I upgraded to Mavericks I have not been able to do backups using Time Machine. Most of the time it stops during the "Preparing Backup..." phase but by deleting prefs and incomplete backups I have been able to get about 50% into writing the backup to my external drive. The backup doesn't crash, but all disk writes and reads stop and the process uses no CPU (it also makes no progress, I've waited there for about an hour after the bar stopped moving).
In addition to this (and possibly related, although I don't know how) I get this message in the console every 30s when my external hard drive is plugged in:
mds[37]: (Error) Server: mdsync launch failed: (ipc/send) invalid destination port
and mdutil -as gives me:
    Indexing and searching disabled.
/.MobileBackups:
2013-12-23 16:30:43.345 mdutil[555:507] Metadata.framework [Error]: mdsCopyStoreAttributes failed: (8) (os/kern) no access
    No index.
/Volumes/Hitachi:
    Indexing and searching disabled.
/Volumes/Hitachi/Backups.backupdb:
    Indexing enabled.
I have indexing turned off for all my drives, so I imagine the indexing is on for the backups folder as a default necessity (I cannot seem to be able to turn it off using the mdutil command).
Does anyone know how these two things are connected and what could possibly be going wrong?

Answer 1

Linc Davis wrote:
I have indexing turned off for all my drives
I suggest you turn it back on, at least on the ones you want to back up.
Is this necessary? It seems to do half the backup without it. If I remember correctly I have indexing turned off not only because I don't use it but also because it was hanging up/using a lot of CPU... If I absolutely must I will turn the indexing back on and wait for it to do its dirty business, but I'm a bit reticent in trading my problem for one that I don't really have an interest in solving.