Time Machine backing up a lot of data.

[shawnperson]

Every time I sit down in front of my computer, Time Machine backs up 10 to 20 GBs. I'm not adding all that much to it. According to Activity Monitor, my "disk usage" is roughly where it was a year ago.
Space utilized: 293.34 GB
Space free: 1.71 TB
Anyone else ever encounter this? Thanks.

 

[Schtumple]

System files often have incredibly minute changes on a daily basis, and thus, get backed up every few days, on my Time Machine drive I had 30 copies of my System & Library folders, just because minute changes must've occurred. Whilst 10-20GB may seem huge, depending on what you do and how often you back up, it probably correlates to quite easily to what you do on your machine.

Also, if you've got 1.7tb free, have you really got anything to worry about...?

My drive is 1tb and my MBP has 2 x 320gb drives, so my TM gets filled pretty much once a month before TM starts deleting the older backups.

 

[maflynn]

Do you use parallels, vmware, Aperture or Lightroom. Those apps produce large folder structures and/or files and can easily cause TimeMachine to back up more then you want.

Use OmniDiskSweeper to see what large files/folders

 

[shawnperson]

Thank's for the feedback.
No, I'm not using aney of that stuff. Only Time Machine. My Mac is only a movie and music center now, I'm a carpenter, so I don't use it for work. Not much changes on it (it just backed up 6GB an hour ago it backed up 5) and I don't know what it's backing up. I'm thinking of formatting the disk and starting over with Time Machine. Thoughts anyone?
Thank you.