Sparsebundle very slow mount in one user account only

[ldrury]

I have an unusual problem, in that, in my main user account only, large sparsebundles (SuperDuper! backups) take an age (2-3minutes) to mount and dismount from my NAS (WD My Book Live).

Another user account on same drive works fine, as does a separate boot drive - ie the images open in a second or so....

Any thoughts on how to troubleshoot this??

[ldrury]

Disregard.... fixed problem by deleting Finder/Sidebar prefs.....

[ldrury]

Too hasty.... this morning things are back to a crawl.....

There doesn't appear to be any processor hogging processes occurring during the mount - it just seems to sit there, then mount the image after 3 minutes or more, once mounted, it is very sluggish compared to the other boot accounts to actually navigate within it....
I don't think this is a network issue - as the other accounts are fine, and mounting a 300GB .dmg image in the same share works fine.....
BTW Networking is gigabit ethernet.....

Any ideas???

[ldrury]

Nothing??
Given only one user account is affected - any ideas to troubleshoot.... deleting Finder prefs and log out/in works, but only briefly (5 min or so) which leads me to believe something else is at play....
I thought of an OS reinstall, but if the other account on this drive is fine, I suspect that wouldn't help??
Any suggestions for troubleshooting single user account problems???

[trevor]

What messages appear in your logs while the .sparsebundle is attempting to mount? You can easily view your logs using the Console app, found in /Applications/Utilities. Check any log that seems to have a name that sounds vaguely relevant to mounting drives or images, but especially the system.log.

Trevor

[ldrury]

system.log -

Marker just prior to attempting to mount the image....

Marker - 15/04/2012 9:05:36 AM
Apr 15 09:05:38 my-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[977]: Starting standard backup
Apr 15 09:05:38 my-MacBook-Pro mtmd[34]: Set snapshot time:1334444740 (current time:1334444738)
Apr 15 09:05:38 my-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[977]: Error -35 while resolving alias to backup target
Apr 15 09:05:48 my-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[977]: Backup failed with error: 19

Apr 15 09:09:13 my-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[996]: Starting standard backup
Apr 15 09:09:13 my-MacBook-Pro mtmd[34]: Set snapshot time:1334444955 (current time:1334444953)
Apr 15 09:09:13 my-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[996]: Error -35 while resolving alias to backup target
Apr 15 09:09:23 my-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[996]: Backup failed with error: 19


The messages at 09:09 appeared when I clicked on the (just) mounted image.
A time machine problem maybe??
The other user accounts certainly don't have time machine activated.....

[ganbustein]

Error -35 is nsvErr: No Such Volume. It can't find the disk volume it's looking for.

The "it" that's doing the looking is com.apple.backupd, more commonly known as Time Machine.

Since mounting this disk image triggers TM to start a standard backup, it must be that it's set to to back up to this volume when mounted. That's probably a mistake, given that it's a volume created by SuperDuper.

One possibility is that you had TM set to back up to volume A, then used SD to clone A into this disk image. TM is now confused about where it's supposed to back up to. Try opening System Preferences → Time Machine, and re-selecting where you want TM to back up to. (Even if it appears to be correct, set it anyway.)

[ldrury]

I understand what you are saying, but the image in question is a clone of a data drive unrelated to the system clone....
Disabling time machine has made no difference in any case.

I'll try resetting where time machine is pointed, and see if that helps.

It is only .sparsebundles that are affected, makes me wonder more about time machine....

[ldrury]

This may help.... (it doesn't help me though!)
If I delete Finder and Sidebar prefs, and log out/in, the problem goes away, ie sparsebundles mount/eject perfectly.... but only for a while.... then its back to slow again....
I'm starting to think I need to make a new user account and migrate stuff across.....

[ldrury]

Hold the phone!
I googled "troubleshooting single user issues osx" and found an Apple page which mentioned deleting caches.... so I ran Cocktail instead, had it nuke all my caches, and everything seems to be working fine, even after a couple of reboots, which is never did before after the pref deletions above.
Fingers crossed.....