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Time Machine backup size

If my disk usage is less than 500GB why would an initial backup be almost 600GB?

Posted on Sep 20, 2020 9:38 AM

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Posted on Sep 20, 2020 4:21 PM

The initial backup will be the same size as on your boot drive with additional overhead for privileges and other under the hood reasons which I don't know.


Subsequent incremental backups will only backup those files that are new or changed with hard links for all of the other unchanged files.


An excellent source of Time Machine info is this tutorial site Apple OSX and Time Machine Tips.

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Sep 20, 2020 4:21 PM in response to icoczar

The initial backup will be the same size as on your boot drive with additional overhead for privileges and other under the hood reasons which I don't know.


Subsequent incremental backups will only backup those files that are new or changed with hard links for all of the other unchanged files.


An excellent source of Time Machine info is this tutorial site Apple OSX and Time Machine Tips.

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Time Machine backup size

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