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Large Backups with Time Machine

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.

iTunes 9 – resolving crash issues

The recent iTunes 9 upgrade has been giving me constant problems, continually crashing and getting the ‘hanging balloon’ every 2 or 3 minutes. I couldn’t get the problem to go away even after  re-installing iTunes 9.

There’s lots of reported issues of iTunes 9 corrupting people’s xml databases over on the Apple forums so there does seem to be a problem with this new version, however i have managed to resolve it by going back to the older version of my iTunes xml library, letting iTunes 9 upgrade the library once again and now everything seems good.

Do this at your own risk, i won’t be held responsible but if you are faced with the same issue and want to try and resolve it then in your home folder in /Music/iTunes/ – there is a folder called ‘Previous iTunes Libraries’ – this is where iTunes stores a copy of the library prior to any new iTunes update.

Shutdown iTunes 9, delete (or better still move to your desktop) your iTunes Library.xml and then copy your older library (named iTunes Library 2009-09-09 in my case) back into the /Music/iTunes/ folder, rename it as ‘iTunes Library’ and restart iTunes 9.

At this point it will either update the library successfully or (in my case) it hung at around 90% complete therefore another force quit and restart and this time iTunes 9 is stable

Hopefully a permanent fix by Apple will be with us shortly