Silencing a cloud storage echo chamber

A routine backup that should have finished in minutes was
instead dragging on for hours. The culprit turned
out to be a tiny menu bar clock app that had quietly sprouted a
million empty folders. Here's how we tracked it
down – and how one very persistent customer finally dug his way
out.

The user, "John", noticed his backup task was taking much, much
longer than expected. He had CCC submit logs alongside his request,
so I was able to review the details of the events. Two stats in the
prescan result stuck out prominently:

📊 Totals: files: 2,622,988, symlinks: 3,766, folders: 1,083,778, data: 601.9 GB. Scanned in 15353s

4 hours to enumerate the source! I checked the source
device details – it was the startup disk in an Apple Silicon Mac,
so definitely not slow. Other context indicated that the startup
disk performance was generally just fine.

The smoking gun

The folder count was suspicious, too – about 5x higher than
usual for that file count. After slogging on a while longer, CCC's
stall detection flagged exactly where the task was getting
stuck:

🔺 Stall encountered...