OK, so if that's the problem, the question now is what to do with the TM disk to recover the space. Will disabling a directory cause TM to remove anything from the backup disk? I'll try it but I doubt it will help. Can we manually go through the backup disk and remove files and directories without corrupting the backup? From what I've read it sounds to me like the backup is a standard file system. Any thoughts on the subject?
Egads, well here it goes as far a programs I have used in the last couple of weeks: Acrobat, Activity Monitor, Adium, Adobe Photoshop CS, Age of Empires II, Calculator, DigitalColor Meter, Disk Utility, Dreamweaver MX 2004, DVD Player, Epson Scan, Firefox, Font Book, Front Row, GammaToggleX, Grab, Mail, Entourage (for one client and exclude), Excel, Work, Safari, Transmit, WhatSize (added after was having TM problems).
At the moment I am testing to see if I can isolate a trouble maker. I have about 1/2 the items on my hard drive excluded. This includes my Applications, Desktop, Library and Movie Folders. I have not had a massive backup since I excluded these on Saturday, 11-24. If I don't have any problems, I will begging adding these back in on this coming Saturday, I major directory at a time.
I am reporting the problem to Apple Feedback. Another idea I have for testing if I get any more of these backups, is to go into TM and "delete all backups" of a large folder, then go to the oldest back up and see if it is gone.
Are any of you folks playing with the exclude function?
I don't have hard data yet, but when I mess with exclude, it seems to want to do another massive backup.
After not touching exclude for a week now, I have had massive backups but only because I actually moved massive files around and it SHOULD have backed them up.
I am trying a new backup on another computer with the all the known excludes done BEFORE it started. We'll see how that goes.
As I mentioned above, I have added several items to my exclude list. This has not triggered a large backup (though I have developed another, hopefully not related, problem of not being able to see recent backups that I cover in another topic).
What it looks like Time Machine does is retain these items in older backups, it just doesn't add them to future backups. In other words, if you have recently added Applications to your Exclude list, you will see it missing from post exclude TM finder windows, but it will still show up on the prior to the exclude windows. If you want it to totally disappear, while in time machine you can click on the gear in the tool bar and select Delete All Backups of "Applications". This in theory should erase all instances of Applications and give room back to your backup drive.
My instinct is to back up just about everything on the initial back up, so I can access just about everything, then exclude the items for which I don't need current backups. Of course, when the Disk eventually fills, it will probably delete this initial backup. Probably better to do it the way you are thinking.
Caution, I have had so much trouble with TM that I am a little skeptical of anything working as it should.
Egads, a cautionary tale to the Exclude issue. On the 25th I excluded the items mentioned above. Now I am having the problem where all my backups since that date are blank/grayed out. TM continues to make its hourly backups, it is that, while I could see these backups last night, I can no longer see them.
I just ran WhatSize on the backup disk and everyone of these recent backups shows 40.8 GB meaning that the data, and alias to data are there, I just can see them. This goes all the way back to 11/25, which shows 76.6 GB and is when I made the exclusions, and which I can see.
Point is, I'm now wary of the Exclude feature. And GW, if I ever run into you, I will buy the 1st drink.
Charles, it is possible that WhatSize could be reporting the virtual size of a specific Time Machine backup rather than the physical size. Doing a get info on one of my individual Time Machine backup shows 28G. However, if I do a get info on the TM partition it only shows a little less than a total of 40G used despite having a whole slew of these 28G virtual-sized backups on the TM partition. Disk Utility also shows the physical space rather than virtual space used for my Time Machine partition.
Not having access to backups done after excluding items is very disturbing. If you can manage the time it would be worth a phone call to Apple and be quite firm about it getting escalated to engineering if they don't have a fix. If you don't have the time at least report it through Apple OS X Feedback.
Photoshop is the only thing you are using that I recognize as being a scratch disk pig but I'm not familiar with all your apps.
GW, you're a true mensch for putting in the time to run the exclude issue to ground.
I haven't run it to the ground yet.... I've only observed that after an exclude change, it SEEMS to want to do a massive backup. I do not know if this is really true or if something else was going on.
Peggy, yes I understood that with WhatSize I was looking at the virtual sizes. What I took the fact that I was seeing these 40 GB backup directories as meaning was that they had the proper virtual links, etc., so they should have been visible in Time Machine. The physical size used on the disk is about double the size of my used internal hard drive space, equal to about one initial and one re-backup of everything.
But here's the weird twist. I was having stability problems with Leopard- 6 freezes since installation. From about the 4th on I started scanning the problem log that was being sent to Apple and noticed that Microsoft Mouse kept reappearing. I went to their site and found an update, 6.2.2 that listed 10.5 as among the systems it is compatible with. I upgrade from the 6.2 I was running. And voila, now I can again see all the TM backups. Hope it also solves my stability issues.
By the way, I know Photoshop runs up big scratch files. Does TM backup these scratch files (it seems like it shouldn't). If it doesn't, where do they actually reside and can I exclude them.
Oh, and GW, forget my comments about disappearing backups. I may have had something like Applications, which I Excluded on the 25th, selected when I went into Time Machine, so of course all the screens between the present and the exclusion date would have shown blank.
I think it is safe to assume that Time Machine will happily backup Photoshop scratch files unless Apple or Adobe says differently. I don't know if Photoshop politely uses a specific folder for its scratch files that can be excluded but I doubt it. I always assign scratch space to an external partition where I temporarily store copies of files that I'm going to archive to CD/DVD and delete. I do not want Photoshop chewing on any of my important drive space so I've done this for many years. That partition is excluded from my Time Machine backups. You can assign scratch disks under Photoshop > Preferences > Performance > Scratch Disk.
I've long ago decided that the Logitech software for my wired optical mouse was pure evil and deleted it. Outdated mouse drivers have always been a very common cause of some really weird system problems, same deal for tablet drivers.
As long as the physical size of your backups seems to reflect the reality of the files you've changed I wouldn't be concerned about the virtual size of Time Machine's backups. I would guess that the virtual size of each backup is what is necessary to do a full system and file restore. However, I would be concerned if the Time Machine pane in System Preferences is reporting a large backup that does not at least somewhat represent the reality of your known file changes.
You wouldn't by any chance run Parallels or (the other one), I am specifically thinking about large disk images of virtual machines that change every time you enter one, and that TimeMachine is struggling with this...
I don't get it. It took the better part of an afternoon the to create the first backup w/ TM. I backed up everything that was on my main HD; 164GB+. Everything worked fine for about a week, and then TM told me my 300GB external that I had dedicated to TM wasn't big enough. Why is my 300 gig HD too small to back up my 164 gigs on my main HD?
It says that 170GB are being used, and 110GB are unused, on the external that TM uses, so whatever it's trying to do now is huge. I assure you that all the things I've done the past week didn't alter anywhere near that many files. So I tried excluding as many things as I could, and reduced the size of the backup by half, but it still won't go. I'm thinking that I should just start all over and exclude uninportant files from the beginning, but I really don't want to dedicate another 6 hour block of time for the initial backup, especially if this is still going to be the end result a week later.
It just doesn't make sense to me. Oddly enough, the older I get, the more I find myself saying that. But anyway, yes, it worked fine for about a week. I didn't notice any slowdown when it was doing it's thing at 7 minutes past the hour, and started to believe this really was a great back up setup for someone like me, and then it popped up a message telling me there wasn't enough space left on my external HD to continue. What confuses me is that it made do with 170 gigs of space on my external for close to a week of backing up 164 gigs of stuff on my main HD, which in and of itself made sense; 164 for the files, and a few more gigs for the changes it found after doing hourly checks for a week. It still had (has) another 110 gigs of virgin hard drive to use, so I thought I was good for months, at least. So what happened after a week that made it suddenly require more than 110 gigs of space to continue?
I build race cars, and can put together a top notch Holley in my sleep. But this has me lost. I'm fine with buying a larger external for TM to do it's thing with, but not if it's requirements are going to double every week.
