I've been using the Tiger backup App, and need some advice. The Full backup of the Home folder was 15 GB. No problem. The incremental weekly backups started quite high, up to 5 GB. After four months the weekly incrementals are under 50 MB. I'm not adding this much new data to the HD, so why is the app filling up the external drive like this? In four months the backup folder has grown to over 50 GB.
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OS X Backup
- Thread starter bigboy99
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Hard to say exactly what the initial huge incrimentals were from, and I don't know what specifically the app backs up, but I'd guess it's probably a cache file or some such that's getting updated frequently, and so gets changed every time.
For example (this is just a guess), if it's backing up your Firefox cache, and that cache is 50MB, then most of that data is going to get overwritten frequently, and so it will end up backed up.
In other cases, files that just get "touched" (just the modification date changed, even though there's no actual data changed, maybe) might be getting detected as changed. This could result in large files getting copied again even though there were no meaningful data changes to the files, just because they were accessed.
For example (this is just a guess), if it's backing up your Firefox cache, and that cache is 50MB, then most of that data is going to get overwritten frequently, and so it will end up backed up.
In other cases, files that just get "touched" (just the modification date changed, even though there's no actual data changed, maybe) might be getting detected as changed. This could result in large files getting copied again even though there were no meaningful data changes to the files, just because they were accessed.
If you change any of your files, they will be re-backuped, not overwritten. So lets say you have a 1GB movie and you back it up. You later decide you don't need it anymore so you delete it. Your originally backed-up file will still remain hogging up all kinds of space.
This may be your problem.
This may be your problem.