Time Machine - Backing up way more data than on HDD

[bp1000]

I'm curious as to why time machine is telling me my first back up (after getting a new ext hdd) is going to be 96GB

I'm only using 38GB according to disk utility on my mba.

I did just recently delete about 50GB of stuff from the laptop and emptied the trash. Could it be this left over somewhere?

80GB of this backup is coming from outside of the user library, so there must be a pile of data in the system folders somewhere?

Another thing to note is my caddy broke so i haven't been doing time machine backups for a week or 2. Could all this space be down to local backups? If so, is it wise to clear them (where ever they are) before doing a time machine backup?


thanks

 

[Stewart21]

It will probably be stored Time Machine backups. Connect your external HDD and let Time Machine do a backup which will include the stored ones and you'll get your space back. You can use other backup software to avoid this happening in future or you could try this :-
http://www.freemacware.com/timemachinescheduler/

It allows you to change the scheduled time of backups so it's not every hour.

I kep Time Machine turned off until I want a backup, turn it on, backup, then turn it off again.

Stewart