Time Machine Back-up Taking Too much Space

Are you including "other" volumes besides the internal drive? Do you have a Parallels or VM Fusion installation with a large disc image that's getting backed up again and again each hour (doesn't take long to add up to 50 GBs.)

You might check the console logs to see what's indicated during your recent TM backups (use the Console application in your Utilities folder.)

For additional help review the three User Tips listed at the top of this forum's topics listing.

The Parallels virtual machine will be backed up UNLESS you specifically exclude it. I'll bet this is where all your space is vanishing.

Exclude the Parallels virtual machine from Time Machine & use a different method for backing up that data.

~Lyssa

Parallels' disc image is backed up along with everything else on your drive you have not explicitly placed in the TM preferences Exclude list. TM does not exclude it automatically. Locate the Parallels folder in your Documents folder and drag the folder to the TM Exclude list in TM preferences.

You have excluded the Parallels application but not the Parallels' pseudo disk drive. You should find them in the /Home/Documents/Parallels/ folder. Exclude that folder.

I have a similar problem but have been running TM for a while and then it says the backup is too big to proceed. I thought it was suppose to throw away some of the older stuff to make room for the new. If I try and exclused "movies" it still says it needs the same amount of space and won't back it up. What can I do besides erase and start over.

Hi mahlquist,

I have exactly the same problem on three macs running SL. Sometimes it simply wants to backup the whole drive instead of creating an incremental backup. The worst thing is that it deletes old backups first (when there is not enough space for an additional complete backup) without asking you if you want it to do that. So, the best solution is to deactivate the automatic backup in TM and start it manually only. Watch at the TM window, see what it is doing when the backup starts. When it starts to delete old backups, cancel the backup, restart your Mac and then try again. In most cases, TM then works again and creates incremental backups. Another bug is that sometimes it backups even folders that are in the list of excluded folders. I didn't manage to break TM of doing that. So I decided for a reinstall of SL on the machine that was affected.

This is one of the most annoying bugs in SL. TM is nearly unusable in SL. I also tried a complete wipe and install of SL to make sure that it wasn't the upgrade from Leopard that causes the broken TM. But this didn't solve the problem. In general, there are lots of bugs in SL. In the meantime, I would say that SL is one of the most annoying versions of OS X that Apple has ever released. Lots of bugs in such a manner are really new to me as a Mac user for many years.