Check what Time Machine just backed up?

[netnothing]

Is there anyway to check WHAT Time Machine actually backed up in a recent backup.

Every once in a while, TM will backup a large amount of data in one of the hourly backups.

For example, this evening, I stopped using the machine around 5:30p. My TM is doing the hourly backups around the 57th minute. So at 5:57p, 6:57p, 7:57p, and so on....TM backup ran and each time in the console I see the standard, 43 bytes backed up, 63 MB backed, etc.

However, just now TM copied 4.7 GB in the 9:57p backup. Why....who knows. I don't have anything open other than my browser and mail. No messages have come in.

Anyway to check to see WHAT TM actually copied in that backup?

As a followup...this happened to me once before a few weeks ago where TM backed up 7+ GB for no real reason.

-Kevin

 

[iBoosh]

I would also like to know this... any offers?

 

[theman]

this brings up another question: why does TM back things up when there have been no changes? i set my mac not to sleep (just display sleep) and when I got home, it had done 6 backups, when the computer wasn't even touched. is there actually something that it's backing up?

 

[netnothing]

this brings up another question: why does TM back things up when there have been no changes? i set my mac not to sleep (just display sleep) and when I got home, it had done 6 backups, when the computer wasn't even touched. is there actually something that it's backing up?

TM will do an hourly backup. Most times if you look in Console.app, you will see that it really backed up anywhere from 43 bytes to maybe 48 MB (these are the ranges I see).

I think a lot of what TM actually does is Apple magic...that's why a lot of people would probably like to see a real log of what is going on.

-Kevin