Time Machine Incremental backups are huge...!

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This is driving me nuts. Suddenly, after working nicely for weeks, Time Machine is backing up 17 gigs with each incremental back up. Within a day, it filled up a 250 gig drive and started erasing all the old back ups. I tried erasing everything and starting from scratch, but it's still doing it...every hour on the hour after a full back, 17.4 gigs. This is ridiculous and I've Googled around and can't seem to find anyone else having this problem.

Any hints, tips, or outright solutions would be greatly appreciated!
 
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Wow thats odd... are you sure? It could file sizes oddly because of it's mechanics of making links.
Click on the hard drive icon in the finder sidebar and get info. That will tell you the true size.
 
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Are you using Parallels or Fusion at all? Everytime you run it, the virtual machine looks like it was updated and TimeMachine will backup the entire thing again.
 
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Are you using Parallels or Fusion at all? Everytime you run it, the virtual machine looks like it was updated and TimeMachine will backup the entire thing again.

When I check the Backup icon that appears on my desktop when Time Machine runs and look into the "Latest" folder it's backing up all my applications, the system folder and the library folder. The entire folder is actually bigger than I thought, a little over 20 gigs.
 
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I think gilevans is looking at the hard links, which count as real files, so of course it seems like a huge backup every single time... but it's not.

Did you try my instructions above?
"Click on the [time machine] hard drive icon in the finder sidebar and get info. That will tell you the true size."

For instance... my entire TM drive is 29GB. But it appears that there are 33 backups of 5.6GB each (which would equal 165GB).

attachment.php


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I think gilevans is looking at the hard links, which count as real files, so of course it seems like a huge backup every single time... but it's not.

Did you try my instructions above?
"Click on the [time machine] hard drive icon in the finder sidebar and get info. That will tell you the true size."

For instance... my entire TM drive is 29GB. But it appears that there are 33 backups of 5.6GB each (which would equal 165GB).

attachment.php

I have a MacBook Pro with that uses about 80 gigs of the 100 gig hard drive. When I first switched to Leopard, Time Machine backed up the whole thing and then did small multi megabit incremental backups every hour. I am using at 300 gig external drive. Then, suddenly, every incremental back up became 17 gigs. Within ten hours the entire external hard drive, which had been about half full for weeks, was filled.

What tipped me off that something odd was happening was that my internet performance was for crap all the time. Why? I back up over my wireless network to the drive attached to the Mac Pro in my office and these massive, nonstop incremental backups were soaking up my wireless bandwidth.

So...I erased all the backups off the external drive and started from scratch, and so far, the same thing is happening. It's like somehow Time Machine is not letting the file system know that it's backed all this stuff up. While it's backing up, when I go to Time Machine Preferences, the swirling "blue bar of progress" reads backing up x amount of 17.4 gigs. And it continues that way until it reads 17.4 of 17.4 backed up. Then it stops. When I look at the external hard drive, sure enough, there's another 17 plus gigs there.

I erased and backed up again a couple of days ago and then shut Time Machine off when 80 gigs of data filled 154 gigs on my external drive.
 
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Ah, I see.
Perhaps it's a time sync issue. Do both machine's clocks have the same time (within a minute?). Check for that, and the location, and daylight savings time settings. They should all match.
If possible, have them both sync to the same time server, such as time.apple.com
On a mac it's in System Preferences > Date & Time
On a pc it's in Control Panels > Date & Time Properties > Internet Time
 
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Same problem

I did a first backup using TM on Leopard. I left it running overnight.
It produced 111GB of backups from a disk that reportedly contains 80GB of data. I tried a further backup months later for TM to report that the 70GB space remaining on the backup drive was inadequate.
Best to find an application that compresses backups, does proper incremental ones and doesn't simply copy and multiply the contents of my drive, then.
Frank
 

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