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detz

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 29, 2007
1,051
0
I've let it completely finish multiple times and in the morning it was backup only a few megs but I'll suspend go to work and when I get back home it starts up again backing up 76GB. What's going on, obviously somethings wrong, what should I do?
 
I've let it completely finish multiple times and in the morning it was backup only a few megs but I'll suspend go to work and when I get back home it starts up again backing up 76GB. What's going on, obviously somethings wrong, what should I do?

Are you accidentally backing up your Safari cache?
Is it always 76GB?

Maybe you should search your harddrive with DiskInventoryX and see if there isn't a file that is 76GB that keeps getting modified somehow causing it to be backed up full every night.
 
Do you use Lightroom or Aperture? Download and run OmniDiskSweeper That will give you a sorted (by size) list of files/folders. Clearly there's a file/library/folder that is that size and being marked as changed.

Usually the LightRoom and/or Aperture libraries are to blame for this but there could be other apps causing this sort of problem
 
Most likely iPhoto, Aperture or Lightroom as stated above - you can exclude them from the TM backup, and in Aperture you can do a separate backup which only backs up changed constituents of the library rather than the whole thing.
 
Library files such as iPhoto are actually folders so that Time Machine backs up the individual files inside of them, not the entire directory.

The culprit is more likely Bittorrent or video files.
 
Do you have vmware or parallels?

That's the only thing from what people listed I use. I just added that to my exclude list and now it's backup up again and it's still huge. I'm not sure what else it could be, it never did this and I haven't changed much. Is there a way to see what time machine is backing up, what's changed?

Weird, I found a script online that tells you and it's backing up apps that I haven't used in a while. It appears it's just doing the backup for the first time...why would this be?


0B-> 2.8MB /25F6ADE7-F7D2-4FE3-9471-DC60A74E7289/Spike/Applications/Chicken of the VNC.app/Contents/
0B-> 286.1KB /25F6ADE7-F7D2-4FE3-9471-DC60A74E7289/Spike/Applications/Clipper.app/Contents/
0B-> 430.0KB /25F6ADE7-F7D2-4FE3-9471-DC60A74E7289/Spike/Applications/Colors.app/Contents/
0B-> 24.6MB /25F6ADE7-F7D2-4FE3-9471-DC60A74E7289/Spike/Applications/DVD Player.app/Contents/
 
That's the only thing from what people listed I use. I just added that to my exclude list and now it's backup up again and it's still huge. I'm not sure what else it could be, it never did this and I haven't changed much. Is there a way to see what time machine is backing up, what's changed?

Weird, I found a script online that tells you and it's backing up apps that I haven't used in a while. It appears it's just doing the backup for the first time...why would this be?


0B-> 2.8MB /25F6ADE7-F7D2-4FE3-9471-DC60A74E7289/Spike/Applications/Chicken of the VNC.app/Contents/
0B-> 286.1KB /25F6ADE7-F7D2-4FE3-9471-DC60A74E7289/Spike/Applications/Clipper.app/Contents/
0B-> 430.0KB /25F6ADE7-F7D2-4FE3-9471-DC60A74E7289/Spike/Applications/Colors.app/Contents/
0B-> 24.6MB /25F6ADE7-F7D2-4FE3-9471-DC60A74E7289/Spike/Applications/DVD Player.app/Contents/
Yes, there is an app to see what Time Machine is backing up. It's called TimeTracker and it's free. It works very well. I had a similar issue with Time Machine always backing up around 7GB each hour. It turned out to be an Adobe DRM cache file.
 
Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry9630/5.0.0.484 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/105)

Do you use .dmg files to store files? I used to get huge backup sizes because I used a 50gb secure dmg to store personal documents and every time that I modified a file in the dmg time machine would back up the entire dmg
 
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