Time Machine has Gone Nuts

I hope somebody can help with this. I have an aluminum Macbook Pro with a 160 GB internal drive and an external Seagate 300 GB drive. There's about 50 GB of miscellaneous stuff on the external drive alongside a Time Machine backup -- in the same partition.
Lately every backup takes forever -- a half hour or more. And the time is increasing. It seems like soon Time Machine will have to run continuously to back up once an hour. During the backup it churns the drive mercilessly -- the head chatters and chatters throughout the backup. If I select the Backups.backupdb and get info on it, I get the same sounds -- and it takes forever, many minutes, to determine the size of that folder. I usually lose patience before it's finished.
However, the backups seem fine. I can open Time Machine and restore from a backup without problems. In all other ways, the drive seems to be functioning fine. I have no reason to believe it's failing.
So -- could drive fragmentation be the culprit? Do I not have enough free space on the drive? (just 15 GB). Can I degrag the drive with Drive Genius 2? Any other suggestions?
Thanks very much in advance.
Steve

Below are a few more console items from that time period. (I'm downloading Time Machine buddy but I assume it'll show the same stuff.) I have no idea whether any of this is relevant, but they're the only items that seem to imply errors. (Except the one in the previous post "Unable to rebuild path cache")
I should add that the backup this morning took well over an hour, at which point I stopped it. It was backing up roughly one day of changes -- not a whole lot of stuff. If I left it on all the time it would never stop working. And throughout the entire process the disk is making a constant churning noise with the head moving all over the place. Just doing a get info on backups.backupdb creates the same noise.
I've read the D2 section in the TM troubleshooting doc and I'm afraid I don't see anything relevant there. I'd long ago removed the TM disk from Spotlight indexing and I don't run an antivirus ap. I will run disk utility on the disk shortly.
My next step is to give up and switch disks. I've got a new 1.5T that I'm going to partition -- one for TM, one for everything else. And I'll start with a fresh backup. But this old backup has stuff going back nearly a year. If needed, can I unplug the new drive, plug in the old one and go back in time with it?
Thanks again,
Steve
Aug 9 07:36:03 Macintosh-2 kernel[0]: AppleYukon2 - bad packet received. length: 1514, packet status bits: CRC error
Aug 9 07:47:13 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3588]: Starting post-backup thinning
Aug 9 07:56:40 Macintosh-2 Quicken 2005[3625]: Quicken 2005(3625,0xa0697820) malloc: * error for object 0xffffffff: Non-aligned pointer being freed\n* set a breakpoint in mallocerrorbreak to debug
Aug 9 07:56:40 Macintosh-2 [0x0-0xe20e2].com.intuit.quicken[3625]: Quicken 2005(3625,0xa0697820) malloc: * error for object 0xffffffff: Non-aligned pointer being freed
Aug 9 07:56:40 Macintosh-2 [0x0-0xe20e2].com.intuit.quicken[3625]: * set a breakpoint in mallocerrorbreak to debug
Aug 9 08:01:07 Macintosh-2 com.apple.launchd[104] (0x10a370.Locum[3631]): Exited: Terminated
Aug 9 08:25:55 Macintosh-2 kernel[0]: AppleYukon2 - bad packet received. length: 204, packet status bits: CRC error
Aug 9 08:25:59 Macintosh-2 kernel[0]: AppleYukon2 - bad packet received. length: 1514, packet status bits: CRC error
Aug 9 08:26:08 Macintosh-2 kernel[0]: AppleYukon2 - bad packet received. length: 85, packet status bits: MII error
Aug 9 08:36:08 Macintosh-2 kernel[0]: AppleYukon2 - bad packet received. length: 85, packet status bits: MII error
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: CGImageCreate: invalid image size: 3 x 0.
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: Exception CIFullButton: sOverOpacity: nil value for argument #1 (over)
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: CGImageCreate: invalid image size: 3 x 0.
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: Exception CIFullButton: sOverOpacity: nil value for argument #1 (over)
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: CGImageCreate: invalid image size: 3 x 0.
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: Exception CIFullButton: sOverOpacity: nil value for argument #1 (over)
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: CGImageCreate: invalid image size: 3 x 0.
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: Exception CIFullButton: sOverOpacity: nil value for argument #1 (over)
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: CGImageCreate: invalid image size: 3 x 0.
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: Exception CIFullButton: sOverOpacity: nil value for argument #1 (over)
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: CGImageCreate: invalid image size: 3 x 0.
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: Exception CIFullButton: sOverOpacity: nil value for argument #1 (over)
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: CGImageCreate: invalid image size: 3 x 0.
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: Exception CIFullButton: sOverOpacity: nil value for argument #1 (over)
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: CGImageCreate: invalid image size: 3 x 0.
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: Exception CIFullButton: sOverOpacity: nil value for argument #1 (over)
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: CGImageCreate: invalid image size: 3 x 0.
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 quicklookd[3680]: Exception CIFullButton: sOverOpacity: nil value for argument #1 (over)
Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2 com.apple.quicklook[3680]: Sun Aug 9 08:39:02 Macintosh-2.local quicklookd[3680] <Error>: CGImageCreate: invalid image size: 3 x 0.
Aug 9 08:39:59: --- last message repeated 8 times ---

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pheadlessg wrote:
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http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
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Tom Baker1 wrote:
My Time Machine backup disk is an external 1 TB firewire drive with only one partition, dedicated entirely to TM, and it backs up the two internal drives in my G5. One of these two internal drives has about 600 GB of data on it and the other about 400, so together they would be enough to fill the external Time Machine backup drive.
Yes, that's too small. Our "rule of thumb" is, TM needs 2-3 times the space of the data it's backing up. See #1 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
Now I have discovered that there is something wrong with the Time Machine backups as well. I decided to go into TM to see just how far back in time the backups go, but it will only allow me to go back as far as yesterday. It acts as though there are no backups older than yesterday afternoon.
That's probably correct; your TM disk is too small, and there's just not room for more. Here's the situation: A full backup has nearly filled the disk; something fairly large has been added or changed, and there just isn't room for it, in addition to the full backup.
The 88.7 GB it's requesting means it's trying to back up about 74 GB (it adds 20% for workspace, etc., on the TM disk).
This is getting stranger all the time. At this point should I just give up trying to fix the situation, erase the backup drive, and start all over again?
That probably won't help much, if at all. To confirm what's going on, Click here to download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window. Navigate to the last backup attempt, then copy and post all the messages for that run here.
You need to do one of the following:
Get a larger drive, at least 2 TB.
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Exclude a lot of stuff from Time Machine (at least 300 GB).
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Time Machine has locked my external drive. HELP

Time Machine hosed me again. After several unsuccessful attempts to backup on my PowerMac G5 dual 2.33 Ghz, I was able to complete my first full backup to an external 2 gig DROBO (USB 2.0 interface). It took 20 hours to do 180 gigs.
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I had written earlier about my work-around for getting my drobo to work right after getting the "read-only" error from Time Machine. But unfortunately it was a temporary and temperamental fix. There were times then I had to eject the disk and launch Disk Utility to run a repair on the disk which would take more than half an hour on my drobo. But all the while my permissions had this "Unknown" user. Well I decided to "Go UNIX" and see if I could fix this problem once and for all.
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chown = changes ownership to...
root:admin = "root" is the user and "admin" is the group.
*/Volumes/Drobo\ Backup\ HD/* = My drobo drive is named "*Drobo Backup HD*", but UNIX sees spaces as command separators, so you have to use the "\ " to signify spaces within a name.
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It seems to be permanently fixed for me, so if you are willing to try this solution, I'm sure it would work for you. If UNIX terrifies you too much, and you do not trust yourself editing the commands above, let me know the name of your drobo drive on your desktop and I will post a message with the EXACT UNIX commands customized for just for you, so all you have to do is copy and paste them into your Terminal window to do it. But like I said, I've done this over a week ago and I not had one single problem.

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