Sample Header Ad - 728x90

Any way to configure fsck_hfs to use more memory to speed up verification of Time Capsule images?

4 votes
1 answer
241 views
Periodically Time Machine verifies sparsebundle backups with fsck_hfs. When the sparsebundle is on a Time Capsule (TC) it does this by creating a partial and much smaller representation of the sparsebundle on the TC, transferring the result to the Mac into
/private/var/db/com.apple.backupd.backupVerification
and then running fsck_hfs on it locally (it mounts the local sparsebundle as can be seen with diskutil list). The problem is that it takes a very long time for fsck_hfs to verify this representation of very large TC sparsebundles (e.g. >24hrs). [This leaves the timemachine process showing in the menu as if it was stuck 'verifying' with the real Time Capsule disk apparently no longer mounted under /Volumes - which confuses many into thinking the process has died] fsck_hfs is launched by its parent process backupd with the parameters -f -n -x -E. There are various posts about fsck_hfs working much more efficiently if allowed to use more memory (-c option). By default (at least on my system) it seems to be limited to 3Gb. My question is, is there any way to pass a config that might cause backupd to launch fsck_hfs with the additional (-c) parameter and so run faster?
Asked by timjph (41 rep)
May 10, 2021, 04:00 PM
Last activity: Feb 25, 2024, 10:04 AM