Clashing of OmniFocus Sync with Time Machine Backup
 

I have noticed a problem with Time Machine and OmniFocus (I think).

If I have a Time Machine backup running, and then OmniFocus tries to sync then my machine hangs with the backup spinning but not progressing and the sync spinning but never finishing.

It may not be this, and I haven't tried to force it to lock as I am still trying to get the backup to complete after 2 fails.

Could there be an issue when both processes try to access the same files? OmniFocus was the only user program running at the time of the 2nd lockup. The lockup stops finder, dock, activity monitor.

I've successfully backed up 3 machines to the Time Capsule, although 2 of them have crashed unexpectedly now at different points (and those are the two that run OmniFocus).

I will also be asking in the Apple forums but I thought I'd also ask here.

For stress testing purposes, I have OmniFocus doing a sync every 30 seconds, and I have a very large database with lots of files most of the time, in a continual state of flux. I also have Time Machine running. I have yet to have any sort of hang, except when a disk starts going bad. I think if there is a general problem with OmniFocus coexisting with Time Machine, we would have heard about it by now!

Quit OmniFocus and have Time Machine try the backup again. I suggest this not because I think there is some interaction, but because I want you to have a complete backup in case there is a failure of your disk happening.

Thanks for the investigation. I did quit OmniFocus to get my backup done. It just seemed odd that they both sync'd at the time they hung.

Do you have your external drive set to spin down when not in use? If for some reason it isn't spinning up when some app asks for all of the disk volumes, that would cause them all to hang in the fashion described as they attempted to list the contents of a directory.