MacBook Pro's Backup Has Too Much Data. Please Help!

[DrummerLedZepp]

So my 13 in. 2011 MacBook Pro with Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 seems to always have a large amount of data to backup when I use Time Machine with a 2 TB WD Elements external hard drive. For the past few times I have backed up my Mac, it has about 80-90 GB of data to back up, although I did not remember getting that amount of GB inbetween backups. I have about 180 GB of Audio, 151 GB of Movies, 22 GB of Photos, 17 GB of Apps, and 146 GB of Other, with about 235 GB free of 750 GB on my MacBook. My external hard drive is filled with 939 GB of Backups, and free with about 1.06 TB. Please help!!! It's driving me crazy, and I'm scared that I will somehow max out my memory on my Mac or my external hard drive. Thanks in advance to anybody that answers me!

 

[mannyo1221]

Are you using VMWare Fusion / Parallels or another virtualisation platform.

If you are using any of these then you really need to exclude the folder(s) containing the virtual HDDs from the time machine backup and deal with these separately.

If you do not then time machine will backup the entire virtual HDD image, and this could be a series of 2GB files or a single file of 10GB+ per virtual machine started / running.

 

[KevinC867]

Are you using VMWare Fusion / Parallels or another virtualisation platform.

If you are using any of these then you really need to exclude the folder(s) containing the virtual HDDs from the time machine backup and deal with these separately.

If you do not then time machine will backup the entire virtual HDD image, and this could be a series of 2GB files or a single file of 10GB+ per virtual machine started / running.

This.

I exclude my Parallels VM, my local movies folder, my Downloads folder and all my external disks from my Time Machine Backups. I use SuperDuper to create a nightly incremental clone as a second backup with everything on my hard drive. If your hard drive should fail, you can boot from the clone and be up and running in minutes.

There's a handy tool called TimeTracker which will give you an overview of the size of the stuff in each Time Machine backup. Look for it here: www.charlessoft.com.