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From: Mirsky on 21 Apr 2008 14:12
Hi. I have a 24" Imac running OS X 10.5.2. It has a 500 gig hard drive
but it's only about 50 gig full. I have been running time machine since
I bought the computer in December. It's storing its backups in a 150
gig external firewire drive. Since the initial backup, Time Machine has
been only backing up about 30 megs or so each hour. I think maybe it's
backing up my e-mail.

Anyway, this morning, the backup drive had 26 gig remaining. However,
all of a sudden, Time Machine has been backing up 3 gigs and it's still
going. I have no idea why it's backing up so much. I am worried it's
somehow backing up everything again and it won't fit on the external
drive.

Is there an easy way to tell which files are being backed up during a
specific backup session? When I go into the hard drive using Time
Machine, I can look into the older folders that are dated. However,
when I look in the older folders, they show a lot of applications etc,
much more than the 30 or so megs that Time Machine claimed to be backing
up in that session.

Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks,

Mirsky
From: Tom Harrington on 21 Apr 2008 14:31
In article <mirsky-CB1320.11122521042008(a)news.verizon.net>,
Mirsky <mirsky(a)mirsky.com> wrote:

> Hi. I have a 24" Imac running OS X 10.5.2. It has a 500 gig hard drive
> but it's only about 50 gig full. I have been running time machine since
> I bought the computer in December. It's storing its backups in a 150
> gig external firewire drive. Since the initial backup, Time Machine has
> been only backing up about 30 megs or so each hour. I think maybe it's
> backing up my e-mail.
>
> Anyway, this morning, the backup drive had 26 gig remaining. However,
> all of a sudden, Time Machine has been backing up 3 gigs and it's still
> going. I have no idea why it's backing up so much. I am worried it's
> somehow backing up everything again and it won't fit on the external
> drive.

First off, even if Time Machine thinks the current backup will require
more space than is available, it tries to handle this sanely by seeing
if it can delete older backups while keeping more recent ones. It's
designed to eventually fill up your back up drive, but to have this be
OK. The only time it would be a problem would be if you had more data
on the source disk than could fit in the backup drive-- that is, so that
not even a single TM backup could fit. With a 500GB source drive and a
150GB TM drive, you could eventually reach this situation. If the
source drive really only has 50GB of data on it, you're not there yet.

> Is there an easy way to tell which files are being backed up during a
> specific backup session? When I go into the hard drive using Time
> Machine, I can look into the older folders that are dated. However,
> when I look in the older folders, they show a lot of applications etc,
> much more than the 30 or so megs that Time Machine claimed to be backing
> up in that session.

That's how it's supposed to work. Each dated backup includes
everything, not just the changed files. It works because it only looks
like there are multiple copies of files that haven't changed-- really,
there's just one copy that looks like it's in more than one place. But
you can go into any dated backup and find any file that existed at the
time the backup was made.

I don't know of a good way to find out what files are getting backed up
at each TM snapshot. TM does produce log files, but they don't contain
anything near to a full list of changed files-- the messages are on par
with "Needs new backup due to change in /Users/tph", which just tells me
that it could be anything in my account.

--
Tom "Tom" Harrington
Independent Mac OS X developer since 2002
http://www.atomicbird.com/
From: Mirsky on 21 Apr 2008 17:26
Tom, thanks for your detailed answer. I have decided to buy a bigger
backup drive so I don't get worried about large backups or having TM
delete older backups. Thanks again!


In article <tph-4DD051.12315521042008(a)localhost>,
Tom Harrington <tph(a)pcisys.no.spam.dammit.net> wrote:

> In article <mirsky-CB1320.11122521042008(a)news.verizon.net>,
> Mirsky <mirsky(a)mirsky.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi. I have a 24" Imac running OS X 10.5.2. It has a 500 gig hard drive
> > but it's only about 50 gig full. I have been running time machine since
> > I bought the computer in December. It's storing its backups in a 150
> > gig external firewire drive. Since the initial backup, Time Machine has
> > been only backing up about 30 megs or so each hour. I think maybe it's
> > backing up my e-mail.
> >
> > Anyway, this morning, the backup drive had 26 gig remaining. However,
> > all of a sudden, Time Machine has been backing up 3 gigs and it's still
> > going. I have no idea why it's backing up so much. I am worried it's
> > somehow backing up everything again and it won't fit on the external
> > drive.
>
> First off, even if Time Machine thinks the current backup will require
> more space than is available, it tries to handle this sanely by seeing
> if it can delete older backups while keeping more recent ones. It's
> designed to eventually fill up your back up drive, but to have this be
> OK. The only time it would be a problem would be if you had more data
> on the source disk than could fit in the backup drive-- that is, so that
> not even a single TM backup could fit. With a 500GB source drive and a
> 150GB TM drive, you could eventually reach this situation. If the
> source drive really only has 50GB of data on it, you're not there yet.
>
> > Is there an easy way to tell which files are being backed up during a
> > specific backup session? When I go into the hard drive using Time
> > Machine, I can look into the older folders that are dated. However,
> > when I look in the older folders, they show a lot of applications etc,
> > much more than the 30 or so megs that Time Machine claimed to be backing
> > up in that session.
>
> That's how it's supposed to work. Each dated backup includes
> everything, not just the changed files. It works because it only looks
> like there are multiple copies of files that haven't changed-- really,
> there's just one copy that looks like it's in more than one place. But
> you can go into any dated backup and find any file that existed at the
> time the backup was made.
>
> I don't know of a good way to find out what files are getting backed up
> at each TM snapshot. TM does produce log files, but they don't contain
> anything near to a full list of changed files-- the messages are on par
> with "Needs new backup due to change in /Users/tph", which just tells me
> that it could be anything in my account.
From: Tom Harrington on 21 Apr 2008 17:47
In article <mirsky-FA4918.14260521042008(a)news.verizon.net>,
Mirsky <mirsky(a)mirsky.com> wrote:

> Tom, thanks for your detailed answer. I have decided to buy a bigger
> backup drive so I don't get worried about large backups or having TM
> delete older backups. Thanks again!

OK, but like I was saying: It's OK if Time Machine needs to delete
older backups. The only reason that would be a problem would be if you
want to keep all old backups for at least, say, six months each, and
your drive wasn't big enough to account for your desired time period.
If you use the same TM drive for long enough, it _will_ fill up the
drive, but that is OK, it knows how to deal with that.

--
Tom "Tom" Harrington
Independent Mac OS X developer since 2002
http://www.atomicbird.com/
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