Can someone please explain Time Machine size

[vansouza]

My Macintosh HD is almost 200 gigs full of Apple goodness. Time Machine backups match the size of lets call it C Drive. But Carbon Copy backs up and says it is backing up only 15 or 20 gig. I had to recover my system with this trusty backup and imagine my surprise when everything was restored just as I had hoped.... so the question... how in the name of God and Apple is that possible?? How can CC back up such a fraction of my drive and have everything be there because if it is only compression why isn't TM using that system.??? Anyway I was wondering... grateful and happy it worked but wondering... Thanks...

 

[JNB]

Incremental backup, maybe?

Try a 100% new clone, and it should be the same size as the occupied space on the cloned drive. SuperDuper! does the same thing, one big backup, then much smaller incrementals after that.

 

[illegalprelude]

dumb answer but has Carbon Copy selected the entire drive or maybe just your user folder and not everything else....

 

[vansouza]

CC clones the Mac HD and makes the target bootable.. and as it is copying I see it reporting 5 gigs and 10 gigs and in about half an hour it is done.

Boy am I a ditz ... I need to check the size of the target drive... I will report back...

 

[tdgrn]

Time Machine makes an initial backup of your entire system on day 1. However many days that you have your TM backup plugged up, it will add files that were added to your machine, but it never deletes them. Therefore, if your HD has 30 gigs of stuff on it, and you have had your TM drive in usage for 6-9 months, (or however else long) it could be much larger, espically as time goes on. TM just adds files.
In my case, I have roughly 50 GB of data on my HD, but my TM backup was 150 after 9 months of usage. (This is higher than normal for most people, I do alot of ISO file moving)

Super Duper and Carbon Copy Cleaner Clone your HD. Therefore if your HD has 45 GB of stuff, the clone will have 45 gigs of stuff.

The benefit of TM is that if you delete something on your computer on say day 58, and today is day 253, you can go back to day 58, and retrieve the files that your computer had it on during that day. Therefore you never have to worry about losing a file that was accidently deleted.
Hope this helps!

 

[vansouza]

Well I checked the CC volume and it is within inches of the same size as the Mac HD. I guess CC is not reporting accurately the size of its backup... but I don't care because it works, and is fast... I think CC is faster then SuperDuper but that is another thread... thanks all...