Time Machine backs up everything every hour, or only what's changed??

[Jesse Smith]

From the book 'Mac OS X Leopard The Missing Manual', it says...

If any file, folder, or setting changes, it gets backed up at the end of the hour. Those follow-up backups, of course, take very little time, since Time Machine backs up only what's changed.

Back-ups do take very little time, BUT, every hour, it's backing up EVERYTHING! My first back-up was 270 Gigs, which is what it was supposed to be, since it was supposed to back-up everything.

The harddrive is 1 terabyte and with out me even being on the computer, each hour it added about 270 Gigs of used space backing up everything, even though nothing was changed.

How do you get it to only back-up what's changed during the last hour? After my first six back-ups (2-4th ones deleted by Time Machine for lack of space), I finally added my media hard drive to the do not back-up list, knocking it down to 53 Gigs per back-up, which is everything on three hardrives, even though during an hour, not even close to 1% of the files are changed!

 

[Jesse Smith]

er, I think I got this figured out. Looking at the 'Get Info' of the '2008-09-03-224133' type folders, and the 'Where' location which is the same in each of the folders, it looks like that's the total space used up in the 'NAME’s iMac' folder at the time of the back-up, instead of adding say 270 gigs of stuff every single time it does an update. I did two back-ups just seconds apart that took just a few seconds each time, and there is no way it could transfer 270 gigs to the hard drive that fast, and instead the 'Backing up: 1 KB of 1 KB' is the REAL size of how much was added to the harddrive. So for a 1 terabyte harddrive, I think I should be safe until my iMac reaches it's own max of 1 terabyte. And I can have it backup my Music and Videos hard drive every time I make a change on it. I think I'm going to love the Time Machine!! Hopefully I'll never have to use it to recover stuff!!

 

[Apple Ink]

Updates....

Sparsebundles created by TM are updated each time something changes.... exception is deletions!

 

[ksw1036]

Not working for me...

I have the exact same problem - 500 gb Sumo hard drive that is getting filled up after 3 back-ups. What did you do to solve the problem? I really need help with this as I've got a lot of media files that I don't want to lose if the worst should happen and at the moment I'm reduced to having to backup manually every week or so and it's taking HOURS.

 

[Batt]

I have the exact same problem - 500 gb Sumo hard drive that is getting filled up after 3 back-ups. What did you do to solve the problem? I really need help with this as I've got a lot of media files that I don't want to lose if the worst should happen and at the moment I'm reduced to having to backup manually every week or so and it's taking HOURS.

It's not filling up. Click on the HD icon and do a Cmd "i", and see what is says about the HD capacity and how much space is available.

 

[ksw1036]

I'm getting a message come up saying that Time Machine has failed because it needs 190 Gb to back up and only 119 Gb is available. My hard drive is 500 Gb and so is the backup disk. Disk information says that there is still over 200 Gb available on my hard drive so why is backup coming up with the insufficient space message? Very confused and distressed....