Since upgrading to El Capitan hourly backups are nearly 100 GB each! Can
that be right? before the upgrade I had backups on my 1 TB disk dating
all the way back to 2015. Now it can't get through a single day without
running out of space. I'm already excluding all my photos, videos, and
applications from the regular backup to save space. What's going on?
Start with D3 and D4 in the 1st linked article.
Time Machine Troubleshooting second source Time Machine Troubleshooting
Start with D3 and D4 in the 1st linked article.
Time Machine Troubleshooting second source Time Machine Troubleshooting
Seems like the issue might have been caused by the fact that I had to wipe and re-install the entire drive, as mentioned in D4, but no solution is offered. I've been kind of afraid to turn it back on since it seems it will have to wipe out my remaining older backups, which I may need, just to do one day's backup. The article doesn't seem clear to me... is it claiming it should just do one full (enormous) backup, and from then on backups should be the the expected size again? Or that this will cause it to start doing full backups every time?
I actually want one complete backup so I have a system backup. From then on I want to exclude things like the system folder, applications, and other huge items that don't change much. Even if the subsequent backups are smaller, how do I keep it from deleting my full backup to make room for the others? It seems like they're still enormous enough to wipe out the entire drive in a single day, and I'd lose my system backup.
It should do a full backup and then do smaller backups that only backup what has changed. If you have changed a very large file that is several GB in size, the backup will be larger because it has to backup the entire file. See question 9 for more information on large backups.
Unless there is an oops, Time Machine will not remove the only backup of the data that is on your hard drive and hasn't been excluded.
Massive Time Machine backups
