Q: Time Machine - Massive (500GB) backups
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Sep 4, 2016 8:12 AMby Ulexes138,Hello Stuttsdc,
Thanks for reaching out to the Apple Support Community. I know how important it is to keep you Mac and its files safely backed up and I'd like to help. The behavior you've described is certainly unusual, and in order to find a solution we may need to do a bit of detective work to isolate the cause.
To start I'd recommend having a look at the overall storage on you Mac under the Apple Menu > About This Mac > Storage. Here you'll see a color coded overview of what types of files are occupying your hard drive. Check to see if the photos and videos take up approximately the same space BackupLoupe specified. If not, check to see if the "Other" category seems to be taking up a majority of the space. If so I'd recommend re-indexing your hard drive using the Spotlight utility.
The process is actually really easy but does take a little time. You can allow it to run in the background while you continue to use your computer. This article will guide you through that process:
Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac
If you run into any other issues along the way or have any questions, please let us know. The whole community is here to help.
-Best Regards- -
Sep 4, 2016 10:40 AMby Stuttsdc,OK. Under 'About this Mac'...
Storage:
*Audio 158.81GB
*Other 126.07GB
*Movies 112.47GB
*Photos 35.42GB
*Apps 13.28GB
*Backups 4MB
Passport (external storage for backups)
*Backups 432.47GB
So, photos, vids, and music are about 300GB, give or take.
Other is pretty big though. Not sure why.
As for rebuilding the spotlight index, that's not completely clear to me. What folder or files am I supposed to be adding to exclude from the spotlight search??
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Sep 4, 2016 11:20 AMby Ulexes138,Hello Again Stuttsdc,
That seems to be a lot of "other" data, and we would definitely recommend rebuilding the Spotlight index. To clarify the info in the article, you are going to want to drag and drop the entire Macintosh HD from the Finder to the privacy list in the Spotlight section of System Preferences.What this essentially does is tell the Spotlight that it is not allowed to search this hard drive. After a moment you will remove that hard drive from the privacy list. This tells the Spotlight that it's now okay to search this drive and Spotlight will proceed to take stock of every file on it, doing a sort of inventory of what data is stored and where it is stored.
This will help ensure that the storage you are seeing used is accurate. It's very likely that you will see that amount of "other" storage decrease after the Spotlight index is done.
The process can be a little deceptive as the system gives no indication that it is doing anything except for a slight slow down, but you can view the progress by clicking on the Spotlight icon (the magnifying glass at the far upper right of your screen). Type in any word but do not hit enter. The indexing progress bar will appear to let you know it is still working.
As always the community is here to help if you run into any issues or have any questions.
-Best Regards -
Sep 4, 2016 2:12 PMby Eric Root, -
Sep 5, 2016 9:05 AMby Stuttsdc,Well, I re-indexed Spotlight as advised.
Now..
Other: 182GB (was 126... went way up!!)
Audio: 158.79
Movies 74.69 (way down from 112)
Photos: 30.73GB (down 5 GB)
Basically, numbers shifted but nothing really changed. In fact, now Other is far larger.
As for the comment about D3/4 in Troubleshooting, I really don't know what to do w/that. I've seen and read that before. I've completely removed and restarted Time Machine, repartitioned my external drive and erased all data on it. I've done everything it remotely suggests and I'm still stuck here.
