What's up with the huge random TM backups?

[MjWoNeR]

I've had Time Machine up and running for a long time. Quite often I see large backups being transfered to the Time Capsule, I see a couple GB, a couple dozen GB, I think whatever.

Though today the numbers don't make sense at all.
It's backing up 2TB of data when max should have been 267GB. What's up with that?

 

[Fishrrman]

I'd suggest that you investigate a "cloning" app instead, such as CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper.

Both are free to download and try for 30 days.
NEITHER will create backups that "grow, grow, and grow" on you.
BOTH offer something that Time Machine can't -- a fully-bootable backup of your internal drive, accessible in the finder...

 

[ZapNZs]

That is just plain WEIRD.

I had a friend with a similar issue, although the size of the TM backups were not even remotely close to as large as yours.

I was stumped so I stole from this thread:
from @jbarley (whom I thank for the info)
Checking the /private/var/vm folder

But, in their case, it turned out that the exclusion path location of one of the VMs was incorrect (they had multiple VMs saved to different locations on the SSD for reasons unknown), and it was making large backups because of how often Windows 10 likes to update itself and rearrange the living crap out of itself because Microsoft likes to update Windows 10 every 25-27 minutes. But even that would not explain what you are facing, which is just a (insanely) massive backup.

Based on the size of the backup and comparing to the size of your exclusions, it appears almost as if TM is disregarding your exclusions? If you hunt through the Finder into the TM backup, is it by chance backing up the files you have requested it exclude?

 

[MjWoNeR]

I'd suggest that you investigate a "cloning" app instead, such as CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper.

Both are free to download and try for 30 days.
NEITHER will create backups that "grow, grow, and grow" on you.
BOTH offer something that Time Machine can't -- a fully-bootable backup of your internal drive, accessible in the finder...

I like the simplicity of TM but I’ll have a look into cloning apps. Thanks.

That is just plain WEIRD.

I had a friend with a similar issue, although the size of the TM backups were not even remotely close to as large as yours.

I was stumped so I stole from this thread:
from @jbarley (whom I thank for the info)
Checking the /private/var/vm folder

But, in their case, it turned out that the exclusion path location of one of the VMs was incorrect (they had multiple VMs saved to different locations on the SSD for reasons unknown), and it was making large backups because of how often Windows 10 likes to update itself and rearrange the living crap out of itself because Microsoft likes to update Windows 10 every 25-27 minutes. But even that would not explain what you are facing, which is just a (insanely) massive backup.

Based on the size of the backup and comparing to the size of your exclusions, it appears almost as if TM is disregarding your exclusions? If you hunt through the Finder into the TM backup, is it by chance backing up the files you have requested it exclude?

I tried checking at some point but didn’t have time to wait for TM to load the folders.

Anyway a couple days later and now TM reports 2.8TB of free space. Really “spoopy” stuff.