TimeMachine: seems to back up lots of GB daily?

Hello everyone!

i run Time machine once a day or so. It always seems to back up 2-3GB per backup. That seems like quite a lot, since i have really not changed nearly anything since the last backup...

is this normal? I mean, i could understand if i was adding GB's of files, or changing GBs of files, but im not really doing either, ever.

i know oSX needs to update things on a new backup, but 2.5GBs worth?

hmm

Time Machine backups do take a LOT of space. Basically, it creates hourly backups every hour and keeps them for 24 hours. After 24 hours, it keeps one of those backups for a week as a "daily" backup. After a week, it keeps one of the week's worth of dailies for a month (along with the ongoing new hourlies/weeklies). I think it also does monthlies for a year.

Anywho... yes, that is a LOT of backing up and largely redundant. You can minimize this by having it only back up specific folders that you feel are the most important. I only back up my user folder since anything outside that folder can be easily re-downloaded or re-installed.

If you make even small changes large file(s) often, it will add up quickly.

If you use Entourage, for example, your Entourage database will be modified whenever you get a new message, or delete one. That's a lot of backups of the Entourage database.

i ran a backup before this thread, and let the machine sit for an hour.

I then manually ran a backup, 2.4GB. not even using the computer, it had that much to backup?

hmmm

kgeier82 said:

i ran a backup before this thread, and let the machine sit for an hour.

I then manually ran a backup, 2.4GB. not even using the computer, it had that much to backup?

hmmm

Click to expand...

It backs up everything (barring what you have in the exceptions list)... not just files that have actually seen a modification. One of the bigger drawbacks to the Time Machine, IMO. Hopefully one day Apple will refine it to the point where it can only back up files that actually have been modified, but otherwise retain the same ease of retrieval.

I have read through all the threads about enabling time machine to backup unto NFS mounted partition but I can not seem to get the time machine to use an nfs disk as a backup disk

please help