How to view ACTUAL Time Machine changes...

You can look into the backup folders on the drive and see the files.

 

I don't quite get Time Machine. After writing a simple page of HTML/CSS in a text editor for about an hour, Time Machine decided it needed to back up all 12.3 GB of it.

 

It's probably podcasts that downloaded within iTunes.

 

You could try Time Machine Buddy. It's a Dashboard widget.

 

Check out timetracker.

http://charlessoft.com/

 

That looks like it just reads the system logs, which are available just viewing the console.

I'm guessing the OP wants to view which files actually change. I think Time Tracker does that, but it's in early stages.

 

I have similar 'issues'. I say 'issues', because I don't let it bother me. It's my backup harddrive, so I just let it do what needs to be done.

I narrowed down one area that may be causing huge backups (ie. 1GB in the span of a few minutes between backups) - iPhoto. I backed up, opened iPhoto added like a couple photos, then closed and backed up again. 1GB. I think certain database files/folders are read as one large one so changes are re-backed up. Remember, Time Machine doesn't parse out changes within a file - if a file is changed, it backs it up again, I believe. For example, filename change? Re-backup.

I don't mind. It's the only way to be sure!

 

I've since downloaded TimeTracker to check. If you have a lot of photos - I have over 20,000 - then it's definitely the culprit. There're a couple of files within the iPhoto Library called thumb.data and thumb64.data or something like that. At a guess, they store all the small thumbnail images for fast viewing, as these are like 200 and 400MB each. You can bet that if they did store thumbnail data that every time you imported new pictures, they would record the thumbnails in there, causing the file to change, and thus be backed up again. TimeTracker indicates that these files are the largest to change after an import to iPhoto.

 

I haven't tried TimeTracker, but I just downloaded BackupLoupe and it seems to be doing exactly what you asked for in your initial question.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/10914383

if it works for you, throw him some money like I'm going to. it lists your changed files that got backed up, in column view, sorted by size, so it's really easy to see what's going on. no, I don't know this guy, it just seems to be very well done.

I discovered that because I changed the name of a folder that had 7 GB of music in it, it got backed up again. so now I can go into time machine and remove the backup of that folder when it had its old name, and reclaim my 7 GB on the external drive.