Archived entries for Time Machine

Large Backups with Time Machine

BackupLoupe for Mac, trying to figure out the large backup size

I've noticed very recently that Time Machine is producing regular and abnormally large backups, so over the Christmas period I recreated my Time Machine backup set from scratch (just in case something had corrupted along the way) but in the space of one week of setting up this new backup plan i've had another three large (70Gb+) backups already. My initial backup is just over 130Gb, so something is clearly not right.

BackupLoupe

In an attempt to diagnose exactly what was going on with Time Machine i chose to download BackupLoupe for Mac  It's a really nice piece of software and only €1.49 (although you do get a full trial before buying). Upon launching for the first time it scanned my Time Capsule backups that had taken place previously, giving me a clear idea of the size of each one, to which i can drill through to get a good picture of what's causing these large backups each time.

BackupLoupe states the larger one's that occur every few days are down to my iTunes folder, particularly movies and tv shows. This still doesn't explain to me why Time Machine decides to take, what seems like, full backups of this folder, particularly seeing that the files within them haven't changed for a while but it's a first step to diagnosing exactly what's going on and how Time Machine makes it's decisions.

Hopefully i'll get a bit closer to an answer in the coming weeks.

Changing Time Machine’s backup schedule

Time Machine Editor for mac

Out of the box Time Machine backs up hourly to my Time Capsule and it's a bit too frequent for my liking. The data on my mac doesn't change that frequently to justify such regular backups over the air.

A friend of mine informed me of a nice little utility called Time Machine Editor that changes the Time Machine backup schedule preferences using a simple GUI, allowing you to customise the frequency of backups any which way you want. Time Machine Editor allows you to set less frequent backup intervals or even setup quite sophisticated schedules and is a really useful, smart and best of all free piece of Mac software that i can't recommend highly enough.



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