Q: Time machine running out of space quickly-Why?

Is the client running virtualization such as VMWare or Parallels?

Are individual photos unusually large?

Are large photos edited so that multiple versions of a photo are also backed up?

Find our more about Time Machine here.

Note that when the Time Machine backup fills up, oldest backups will be deleted.

I use a different "archive" drive, cloned separately as a backup, where I store older files no longer needed on my startup drive.

Do you use virtualization software, such as VMware, Parallels, or VirtualBox?

The virtualization software creates a large virtual-disk container that is constantly changing, so it has to be backed up every time Time Machine runs. That will quickly fill up any backup destination.

You should exclude the virtual-disk file(s) from your Time Machine backups. To do that, click the Options button in the Time Machine preference pane. Back up the files on the virtual disk from within the guest system, using a native backup application.

A compromise solution is to create a "snapshot" of the virtual machine in the virtualization software (not a Time Machine snapshot.) That will give you a single large file that never changes and only has to be backed up once. All the subsequent changes will be stored in a new file that's initially much smaller, but will grow over time. You should still exclude that file from TM backup. If you ever need to restore the VM from Time Machine, you'll have a working setup, which will make it easy for you to restore the rest of the data from within the guest system.

Another common cause of large TM snapshots is native OS X disk images. If you store a lot of data on one or more writable disk images, they should be in "sparsebundle" format, which will be backed up much more efficiently than any other format. Also be aware that disk image files are not backed up at all while the image is mounted. Make sure you unmount the image often so it can be backed up. If you ever restore, you will, of course, lose all changes made since the last backup. Consider eliminating large read/write disk images from your workflow, if possible.

Triple-click anywhere in the line below to select it:

tmutil compare | open -f -a TextEdit

Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C).

Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.

Paste into the Terminal window (command-V).

The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.

A TextEdit window will open with the output of the command. Each line that begins with a plus sign (“+”) represents a file that has been added to the source volume since the last snapshot was taken. These files have not been backed up yet.

Each line that begins with an exclamation point (“!”) represents a file that has changed on the source volume. These files have been backed up, but not in their present state.

Each line that begins with a minus sign (“-“) represents a file that has been removed from the source volume.

Files that you’ve excluded from backup, or that are excluded automatically, are ignored.

At the end of the output, you’ll get some lines like the following:

-------------------------------------

Added:

Removed:

Changed:

These lines show the total amount of data added, removed, or changed on the source(s) since the last snapshot.

I think I have to sift through each backup and fetch a size. Unfortunately "Calculating Size" is not quick. I think I will approach this by doing one random backup per week (15 weeks) to see if I find anything. Will report back.

Note that Get Info will not report actual size of a TM backup; it will report the size as if everything were restored.

Note Linc Davis option above.

Mmizen wrote:

. . .

I cannot believe how 300GB of data were added in this time period.

That's not too surprising, in general.  Remember that also includes changes, so large files (especially database files), may eat up a lot of space pretty quickly.  Also see #D4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

And our usual recommendation is, TM needs at least 3 times the space of the data it's backing-up, to provide a reasonable "depth" of backups.

How do I explore other than review each backup and do a get info to see which backup "spiked" the drive.

Get Info really won't tell you much.

Try one of the apps in #A2 of the same link.  It won't be quick, but should tell you if there's a "hog" lurking there.

I had some similar trouble when I bought a new laptop in March and migrated my previous machine's contents to it, from Lion to Mountain Lion.  I don't have any of the obvious causes of large Time Machine backups (e.g. large Windows image or the like) and it remains an unresolved issue with Apple support (they never called me back after promising to escalate it).

I had good experiences with BackupLoupe in seeing what was taking up all the space.  What it told me didn't make a lot of sense, but at least I could see how the disk was being consumed (you can read more details in this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/message/21720088#21720088). After a few weeks of strangely large backups, it settled down and is now back to normal.

Hope that helps a little - if nothing else, a plug for BackupLoupe to help you find out what is going on.

Ivan

That's very interesting.  It seems similar to a few cases we've seen where TM on 10.8 suddenly stoped backing-up /System, /Library, and the hidden /private folders, plus in at least one case, /Applications. 

In these cases, it just flat stopped -- didn't start up again.  Whether this is really related, we don't know, but it sure is suspicious.

Without /System, of course, you can't do a full system restore. 

Worse, without /private, Setup/Migration Assistant doesn't even recognize them as backups, since that's where user accounts are,  thus there's nothing to associate the home folder(s) in /Users with.

Worse yet, we have no clue what caused it.

From the other thread, it looks like this hasn't happened to you since April?

I'd like to ask for your help in running this serious bug down:  please keep an eye on it, to see if /System, /Library, and/or /private suddenly disappear. 

As you know, either TimeTracker or BackupLoupe makes that pretty easy, so if you can, check at least once a day, so we can catch it before hourly backups get "thinned" and we can't tell exactly when it started.

Then, maybe, we can get you to run some diagnostics and file a Bug Report with Apple. 

I'll make a similar post in the other thread.

On second thought, I started a new thread:  https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5080333