What is Time Machine Doing?

[Harmush]

I got time machine running on an external HDD on my iMac, and i have Networked my UnibodyMB to it so it backs up when the disk is available. It gets to back up everyday because i am never away from the house for that long?
But EVERYDAY it backs up at least 6GB which takes ages!! Where is it getting all this from? The iMac only ever backs up ~100mb a day. Where is this 6gb coming from off the macbook?

Thanks

Tom

 

[Nugget]

The next time Time Machine goes nuts with disk activity, open up a terminal window and run the command "sudo fs_usage" (it will ask you for an administrator's password). If you make the terminal window nice and wide you can watch the filenames of each file that Time Machine is handling scroll by in real time.

It can be a lot of information, but generally it's pretty easy to see what area of your hard drive is consuming so much time. I had a giant mail folder recently that was causing time machine to take a crazy amount of time due to the overhead of the tens of thousands of tiny files for each mail message in the folder. I ended up just excluding ~/Library/Mail/ from Time Machine as a result and now it's back to being fast again.

 

[miles01110]

Are you downloading torrents? A lot of torrent programs create dummy files when something first starts to download.

 

[JediMeister]

I think Time Machine does full-backups of Entourage and Aperture data files too, so exclude their libraries/data files if you have either of those installed.

 

[Nugget]

VMWare or Parallels virtual machine disk images as well. Those will get backed up entirely every time you use the virtual machine.

 

[TheScavenger]

I think Time Machine does full-backups of Entourage and Aperture data files too, so exclude their libraries/data files if you have either of those installed.

I agree. Any large files that are tweaked regularly like entourage, iMovie (etc) will eat up a lot of disk space. Try excluding them.

 

[OldSkoolNJ]

If you are up to date on software updates Aperture should no longer do this. I can not remember when but there was an update which fixed this. I can assure you that. With a library of 40,000+ photos who adds to it everyday it does not re backup every day. As for Entourage I would not know. Never used it. I would do what they suggest and check terminal. Only thing I can think of is maybe it does not successfully backup those 6gbs and it keeps trying everyday to do so.

Kevin

 

[Harmush]

VMWare or Parallels virtual machine disk images as well. Those will get backed up entirely every time you use the virtual machine.

this will be it. i don't run torrent or anything, and it only goes nutty on my machine that i use VMFusion on. any way of excluding it from the backup?

 

[jrabbit]

Excluding VMware Fusion Files

this will be it. i don't run torrent or anything, and it only goes nutty on my machine that i use VMFusion on. any way of excluding it from the backup?

Easy:

1. Open Time Machine Preferences...
2. Click the "Options..." button
3. Click the "+" sign under the "Do not backup:" list
4. Select the folder containing your VM(s) and click the "Exclude" button
5. Click "Done" in the Options panel

 

[Harmush]

very easy, you think i would of worked that out by myself really. lol.

thanks guys working fine now