Time Machine & large backups

I recently set up TimeMachine with a 750 external hard drive, but it's been filling up very quickly. Even though I only have a 150GB primary drive (mid-2009 13" MBP), It's managed to fill up 350 GBs in the last couple days. I also noticed that each time it backs up, most likely once a day (I leave the drive disconnected most of the time), it seems to do about 14 GBs each time.

I rarely change files, except for Mail App, which I use with Gmail (IMAP). I also have quite a few photographs, but doesn't Time Machine only backup what has been changed?

Should I not have it backup Mail?

 

No one?

 

I use tm on three of my machines and have never experienced what you are describing. The only explanation nI can come up with is that the files have really changed.

 

If you have a virtual machine (Parallels or VMWare) be sure to exclude the virtual machine files from your backup. They will cause this symptom as the huge file is changed anytime you run the VM.

-howard

 

Duh... dude. Thanks so much for mentioning that. I use VMWare and always have a W2K IIS server running, plus an XP VM for remote desktop, plus a couple other VMs for testing. That makes sense. I'll exclude my VM folder.

I'll let you know if it works.

 

Yep. Just did a backup and it's only ~200 MB for the last two or three days. Probably just email, which sounds about right.

Thanks!

 

Yeah ... that sounds much better.

I learned that lesson the hard way too ...

-howard