Problems: undoes sleep, and won't give up

Question

Folks:
A few days ago, I connected a new Seagate 1.5TB drive (USB2), accepted an offer to format the drive, and enabled TM. (Or was it vice-versa? I don't recall.)
First Problem: Something undoes sleep
Since then, when I use Apple Menu "Sleep" the system goes to sleep, and that wakes up a few seconds later. Always. This cannot be good for the system, and it isn't good for my electricity bill.
Is this waking due to enabling TM and/or attaching the Seagate drive? It seems likely, as it started happen just after I enabled TM, and I am certain I have done nothing else to the system that should affect sleep. About "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" in the Energy Saver Control Panel: I routinely leave this ENABLED. I've tried both settings since I enabled TM. No difference.
I routinely leave the Energy Saver "Put the computer to sleep when it is inactive for" setting to 15 or so minutes. Since the computer was not been asleep any morning when I start work since I enabled TM, I assume this route to sleep also fails.
Q1: How to restore sound sleep on my system?
Second issue: Won't give up.
At the moment, the TM monitor icon at the upper right of my screen is circling. It's been circling for at least 15 minutes. Before that I noticed that TM had started a backup. I checked: it was going to back up only 552 KB, which seemed reasonable -- I haven't been doing very much so far this morning. I checked minutes later. No sign of progress. I checked a few minutes later, no progress, so I clicked on the 'x' to abort the backup. Now the top entry on the TM monitor pulldown has been reading "Stopping Backup" for at least 5 minutes.
What to do? TM won't be able to do the next hourly backup if it's still trying to abort the previous one. I tried disabling TM in its Control Panel. It's now off, and yet both the Control Panel and monitor say it's back to trying to backup 552KB ... again.
I'll try dismounting and remounting the external drive. If that fails, I'll restart the system. But, of course, neither of these should be necessary.
BTW, strangely, the full TM menu says the last backup was at 3:10 AM, almost 7 hours ago. Since I didn't try to put the system to sleep last night at about 10pm, and it wasn't asleep when I arrived ... why 3:10? Maybe that's when the Unix cron-timed daily maintenance was done?
By the way, the USB drive IS alive and working. I opened it, found a random file from one of the backed-up folders, and copied it to my internal drive, no problem.
Q2: How to definitively abort a backup?
Q3: How to avoid hung backups in the future?
TIA,
Henry

Answer 1

Pondini:
Thanks for your response!
1. Exclude your TM disk from any anti-virus scanning.
None running.
2. Exclude it from Spotlight (System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy)
Done! The next hourly scan was running so I aborted it by unmounting and remounting the external disk. When I remounted, TM appeared to be in a consistent, "happy" state. So I chose "Back Up Now" and the backup ran without apparent problem.
So far, so good, Excluding seems to have helped. I'll post back if anything different happens at the next hourly backup, or overnight.
3. Until you resolve this, leave the Put the hard drive(s) to sleep . . .
option OFF.
I did that before my original post, and left it disabled.
My system still won't stay asleep for more than a few seconds.
How is your USB disk attached to your Mac (direct or via USB hub;
port on back or keyboard)?
Directly to the back of the machine. My Mac did not seem to like for it to be connected though my external hub -- it complained about not enough power and shut down the hub. That seems strange, because both the drive and the hub are powered separately by wall-warts. But that's not an issue now.
There may be some clues in your logs. Download the Time Machine Buddy widget
from: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/timemachinebuddy.html.
I'll just use the standard log interface... It shows some nice messages for successful TM backups. Two messages seem to correlate with TM hangs. Here they are:
Indexing a file failed. Returned -1120 for: /private/tmp, /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Espresso/2009-04-28-041015.inProgress/02A5D71D-2086-47 E0-A006-3C8030F2CAD8/Espresso's HD/private/tmp
Indexing a file failed. Returned -1120 for: /Library/Caches, /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Espresso/2009-04-28-041015.inProgress/0B66D534-640A-4F 08-9ED4-CBB0F3872450/Espresso's HD/Library/Caches
I googled around about "Indexing a file failed" in connection with TM, but I didn't find anything that useful.
You did this via the Finder? For experimenting, that's ok, but normally to
restore a file/folder from your backups, use the TM interface Enter Time
Machine. Using the Finder can result in permissions problems with the copied
files. Also be very careful not to use the Finder to change, move, or delete
anything in those backups...
Thanks for the warning. I figured as much. I just located a small file on the TM disk and made a copy of it on my internal drive. Simply copying a file from the TM backup directories should not be a problem. If it is, that would indicate TM is a lot less stable than it should be.
By the way, my profile is wrong. I'm running 10.5.6, fully updated.
Thanks,
Henry