Is this normal Time Machine behaviour?

[fingleburt]

I back up my mbp manually with TM to an external HDD via USB. The first backup was just over 100GB, fair enough as that is the size currently used on my SSD with OS and apps on. I backed up manually again yesterday as I took a few pictures and videos. This back up however was 55GB of data! At most the pictures and videos were 400MB, where has this 55GB of data come from? Nothing had been downloaded or installed that wasn't already on the first backup, it was my understanding that TM performs incremental backups? Unless I am understanding incorrectly?

TIA
Fingle

 

[phrk]

Are you using VMware? Before I excluded my VM in TM they got fully backed up everytime I used them and then did a TM backup.

 

[coodem]

VMware or parallels x2. I exclude the pvm file to avoid this every time I use windows. And jusT backup the pvm once a week or as required

 

[fingleburt]

Thanks guys, yup using Parallels. Added an exclusion for the pvm and started a TM backup, 25megs backed up this time so a huge improvement! So it was backing up my VM each time? Is there anyway to remove the extra VM backup TM created yesterday? I normally just backup the pvm over my network to my PC so dont need TM to back it up for me at all.

Again really appreciate the help

 

[smirk]

Sure, just open the folder containing your VM file, bring up Time Machine, go back in time to yesterday's backup, and delete it. I think while you're in Time Machine you can even select a file and then take a contextual option to delete all backups of that file.

 

[Kayan]

Sure, just open the folder containing your VM file, bring up Time Machine, go back in time to yesterday's backup, and delete it. I think while you're in Time Machine you can even select a file and then take a contextual option to delete all backups of that file.

Yes, I might add as a word of caution that you MUST manage your Time Machine backups from WITHIN Time Machine! In other words, you can't just go into your TM backups folder on your external HD and delete stuff you see. It causes problems and ruins TM for many people online.

What you need to do (and you should Google some videos/tutorials teaching this, there are many) is Enter your Time Machine screen (the one that takes you into space with a single window) from the Finder bar and then go to whatever backups you want to delete, click on the Finder Bar Settings Gear and click "Delete Backup", or if you have a file in your TM backups that you want removed, select "Delete all backups of this file" (or something really close to that phrase) and all occurrences of that file in TM will disappear.