Apple's Backup program question

[slackersonly]

I have been using Apple's Backup program for about 2 months now. I just had an error that my external hd was full so I did so looking into it.

I backup 3 things on a weekly basis. Personal Data & Settings (PDS) to iDisk and my external drive, Home Folder to external drive, and iLife to external drive.

My external drive is 300gb (279.34gb in real life). My iMac is 250gb. I am not backing up every little thing so how can my external drive be full when my regular iMac drive is not?

Upon further investigation by opening my external drive folder and choosing any of the 3 backup folders, I see each has a 'FullBackup' file and bunch or 'IncrementalBackup' files. These files total waaaay more than the actual file on my regular hd.

1. What is actually happening to cause then continuously growing problem?
2. How do I fix this?
3. Am I duplicating some backup by having both Home and iLife backed-up as all my iLife data is stored in the suggested place which seems to be folders in my Home folder anyways?

 

[slackersonly]

anyone?
bueler? bueler?

 

[bearbo]

I have been using Apple's Backup program for about 2 months now. I just had an error that my external hd was full so I did so looking into it.

I backup 3 things on a weekly basis. Personal Data & Settings (PDS) to iDisk and my external drive, Home Folder to external drive, and iLife to external drive.

My external drive is 300gb (279.34gb in real life). My iMac is 250gb. I am not backing up every little thing so how can my external drive be full when my regular iMac drive is not?

Upon further investigation by opening my external drive folder and choosing any of the 3 backup folders, I see each has a 'FullBackup' file and bunch or 'IncrementalBackup' files. These files total waaaay more than the actual file on my regular hd.

1. What is actually happening to cause then continuously growing problem?
2. How do I fix this?
3. Am I duplicating some backup by having both Home and iLife backed-up as all my iLife data is stored in the suggested place which seems to be folders in my Home folder anyways?

i might be ignorant here, but what is the apple backup program?

 

[robbieduncan]

i might be ignorant here, but what is the apple backup program?

It's provided as part of .Mac.

 

[jeshepard]

The program (version 3.x I think) does an incremental backup. So each time a file changes, it backs up the new version and leaves the old version alone. Also, if you delete a file and backup again the deleted file may still be backed up somewhere. What I would do is delete the backup files and start over again.

 

[bearbo]

It's provided as part of .Mac.

ah, that explains, i dont have .mac

 

[IJ Reilly]

Incremental backups are the default behavior of Backup. To work around this, under the "Plan" menu, select "Full Backup" for the selected plan. You won't want to do this often, though, because of the amount of time it takes.