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Time Capsule almost full... but how?!

Terry Smith

Terry Smith

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 28, 2009
43
0
Toronto
Hi there, first time on the board, but you seem to be a really smart bunch of folks... so here's the deal.

I have a 500GB TC on the network, used ONLY for backing up two machines on the network. My Macbook has maybe 40GB and the iMac approx 20GB. When I look at the disk image on the TC, it shows that the two backup images take up about 60GB as expected, as the incrementals are small (business documents and emails - crap like that), and I assume they are using some form of compression. So why is it showing that I only have 15GB left on the thing? Are there a bunch of secret and hidden incremental backups in there I can't see easily?

Can someone shed some light, or perhaps provide me an example of their situation and disk use? Been using the capsule for about 6 months, so thought it would last longer than that.

You help is appreciated!

TMS
 
Even if the drive is filling up, TM will still work. It will start to remove older weekly backups (if I recall correctly), making enough space to backup current stuff and relying on more spaced out backups.

Like I said, it would remove dailies and rely on the weeklies, similar for weeklies to monthlies.
 
even so his time machine disk should be nowhere near filled yet, I have it backing up my imac which has a bunch of video and media files. My hard drive is using up about 160gb on my iMac and i add stuff all the time. My time machine which is constantly backing up has like 300 something gb of empty space.
 
Is that it though?

Is there no room left add another machine? The Backups seem to switch automatically to weekly after the current month, which is smart AND cool... but still have this mystery space useage issue...
 
Yes, I checked it out, one great big partition, with only 15ish GB left.
Can anyone else compare their TC/TM combos for me? If it's not working properly, can I just back up the two backup files, format the thing, and put them back? Will that fix it I wonder?

Again, thanks thus far... great board.

TMS
 
Time Machine does not use compression, but your Time Capsule shouldn't have filled up so fast.

Open the Time Capsule drive, select all folders, and do File -> Get Info. It'll take a while to calculate the folders' sizes, but they should closely match the total used space on the drive. It's possible that some invisible file is taking up space.
 
Terry Smith said:
Yes, I checked it out, one great big partition, with only 15ish GB left.
Can anyone else compare their TC/TM combos for me? If it's not working properly, can I just back up the two backup files, format the thing, and put them back? Will that fix it I wonder?

Again, thanks thus far... great board.

TMS
Click to expand...

look at my post i put down my numbers.

you can try to repair permissions in disk utility without having to delete anything and see if that helps.
 
Thanks... checked on my TC at home, and it's obvious that there's something wrong at the office... my machine here pretty much just matches the size of the machine it's backing up.

Will try some of the utilities, and see if it helps... I did the
'select all - get info' route and came up with 60GB... not the rest... hence the post.

Thanks for your feedback... will post resolution if I get one.

TMS
 
Hm, try opening a Terminal window and typing:

ls -alh [drag the Time Machine drive's icon from Finder into the Terminal window]

Then copy and paste the command's output into a post here.
 
Here you go as requested...

terry-smiths-macbook-pro:~ TMS$ ls -alh /Volumes/Smart\ Time\ Capsule-1
total 88
drwx------ 13 TMS staff 398B 28 Jan 11:41 .
drwxrwxrwt@ 4 root admin 136B 29 Jan 15:46 ..
-rwxrwxrwx 1 TMS staff 16B 22 Aug 10:52 .001b6392cccc
-rwxrwxrwx 1 TMS staff 16B 18 Sep 17:09 .001ec20e5211
-rwxrwxrwx 1 TMS staff 16B 27 Jan 17:36 .001ff345594e
-rwxrwxrwx@ 1 TMS staff 6.0K 22 Aug 10:51 .DS_Store
drwxrwxrwx@ 3 TMS staff 264B 18 Sep 14:57 .TemporaryItems
-rwxrwxrwx@ 1 TMS staff 0B 18 Aug 10:54 .com.apple.timemachine.supported
drwxrwxrwx@ 6 TMS staff 264B 22 Aug 10:56 Terry Smith’s MacBook Pro_001b6392cccc.sparsebundle
drwxrwxrwx@ 6 TMS staff 264B 18 Sep 17:10 Tracy Wolbaum’s iMac_001ec20e5211.sparsebundle
terry-smiths-macbook-pro:~ TMS$
 
Hmm, try

sudo rm -rf /Volumes/Smart\ Time\ Capsule-1/.TemporaryItems

(Copy and paste this command into Terminal, since a typo could result in your entire hard drive being erased.)
 
Didn't seem to do anything...

Asked for my password, accepted it and then nothing... just accepts the command and nothing happens.

Appreciate you trying to help me out... very frustrating... can't find anything about this anywhere.
 
Do you have a virtual machine installed such as VMware Fusion or Parallels? If so then that's your problem. TM doesn't backup the changes in Windows, it actually backs up the entire VM image. Each time TM does a backup it will backup the entire VM image again and again and again which can fill up your TM drive very quickly.
So, if you are backing up a virtual machine you should exclude it from TM backups.
 
Terry Smith said:
Asked for my password, accepted it and then nothing... just accepts the command and nothing happens.
Click to expand...

That means there wasn't an error. Unless you specifically tell it to be verbose, UNIX will normally just accept a command without a response except in case of a problem.

Still the same amount of free space?
 
Yeah, the line command didn't do anything.... BUT

The VMWare post suggestion is very interesting... and my local guru thought... hey? What's the single biggest file I use all the time? It's my entourage file.

I am one of the lazy guys that never empties anything, and I think my Entourage file is easily 2GB at any given time... so the question is this to you all: Does any email or change (deletion, new mail, variances in file size) mean (because it's one file for the whole mail system) that it's backing up the 2GB file? Every hour?

Then the inevitable next question... why can't I just see a massive backup volume, vs. the little one (*40GB) I displayed above?

Yes I run Fusion... will check that out too... very interesting if it's the entourage file being backed up constantly every hour... could be a major problem everywhere for people like me....

TMS
 
Conclusion

Thought I would close this off... the problem was Entourage and Time Machine. I have a very large (turned out to be 5GB) database, and every single time I got/deleted/changed/forwarded/sent an email, it changed the file size.

Because Entourage uses a one file DB for it's information, incremental backups aren't possible, and it was copying a brand new version of that huge file EVERY TIME IT BACKED UP.

Now, after investigation, I see one should exclude this file (and the VMware Fusion profile - thanks for that!) from Time Machine backups, and do something else with those to back them up.

The space was used up by massive interim hidden files on the time capsule. I have since erased the TC, and started again (excluding the files)... and things seem more comfortable now.

On another note, I have spent the week looking for a new mail client that matches the power of entourage - but uses a different archive method - but to no avail. Nothing out there.

Ah well, thank you all for your help in this.

TMS
 
Time capsule full

I use VM Fusion. I am trying to exclude it, but I cannot find a file name to exclude. Could you help me to find how to exclude it?

Sorry for being dense.
 
I noticed TM doing large backups (2GB) even though nothing much had changed. Drive space was not an issue (1TB with 200GB free) but wondered what was being backed up. I used TimeTracker to look at what was happening. Turns out to be Tech Tool Protection directory backups. I excluded these from TM (Library/Application Support/TechTool Protection) and now all is fine.

So I then went into TimeMachine and deleted all backups of TechTool Protection, and recovered 300GB!!!

bbb
 
Time Capsule only shows 'Now'

We recently had a mail crash whilst deleting some errant mails and the machine (a geriatric G5 c.2006) drew a grey veil over the screen and then went on holiday.

OK, well having used Time Capsule (a 2Tb version) to back up we simply thought there would be a version we could restore from. Clicked into TC whilst in 'Mail' and it took a while but up popped all the mails in the inbox (and there are large quantities). So far so good, all we had to do was hit 'restore'...but TC only showed 'Now', there were no other back ups available to us.

Has anyone come across this before and if so how did you work round it?

Uncle H
 
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