Time Machine

[glenalex]

Have installed 10.6.7 on iMac - complete erase and new install. Have initially blank external drive configured for backup using Time Machine which worked perfectly for 2 weeks and is now trying to back up the whole Mac hard drive - 320Gb.

Anyone seen this happen before? There is only around 140Gb used on Mac HD.

How can I get around this?

 

[r0k]

Have installed 10.6.7 on iMac - complete erase and new install. Have initially blank external drive configured for backup using Time Machine which worked perfectly for 2 weeks and is now trying to back up the whole Mac hard drive - 320Gb.

Anyone seen this happen before? There is only around 140Gb used on Mac HD.

How can I get around this?

Time Machine is somewhat crappy. Ok, it's very crappy. If you care about your backup data, try opening the backup using disk utility and repair it. If it fails to repair, just grit your teeth and delete it and start over. I know this isn't what Time Machine is advertised to do but it will occasionally fail. Apple support has blamed this on machines going to sleep when backing up via wifi. Hey, they wrote the OS, don't ya think they could keep the darn thing alive long enough to avoid corrupting the backup destination volume? But I won't even go there. All I can say is you need another backup method besides Time Machine. If you don't want to spend an hour watching disk utility try to (and possibly succeed) at repairing your backup volume, simply delete it and start over. Your next backup will take f-o-r-e-v-e-r but you'll have good data to restore from. This is much better than letting things continue only to find out TM is unable to restore from your current backup when you need it.