Infinite Backup
I'm having a weird, and persistent problem with Time Machine.
A while ago, Time Machine (on my Time Capsule, 500GB) ran out of space while doing what seemed like an unusually large backup. For some reason it was not deleting old backups, or compressing the archive to create space, or decided it wanted to back up a huge amount of data for no real reason. In the end, after researching on various forums, I decided to wipe it clean and start over.
This worked for a month, then just after new year, it happened again, and I payed close attention to what it was doing. It began backing up data, estimated that there was around 140GB to update, and began. When the progress bar reached 140GB, it then continued backing up. The amount completed, and the amount to backup continued to rise together, ad infinitum, until all the space was used up and the backup failed.
I spent two days trying to sort it out, but each time it began to backup, the same thing happened. I removed my huge iTuned Media Library, thinking that it was trying to back that up again and again. I bought a new 1TB HD, and erased the Time Capsule, reset it, trashed Time Machine prefs, excluded a bunch of big files from the backup, and set it to backup on the new HD. It came up with about 69GB to backup, and completed. This was all achieved via the ethernet connection. This morning, backups continued as normal.
Today I went out, came back, connected via wifi. A backup began for 2.9GB. I thought this was a bit large, but as I'd been playing around with something on iMovie, I assumed it was probably OK.
Now it is happening again. It got to 2.9GB - then continued backing up. It is now at 8.75 and counting.
This makes absolutely no sense. It only happens with my MacBook as far as I can tell, and it is driving me up the wall.
Could there be a conflict with some software? Could it be a system error? I'm running out of things to try to fix it.
A while ago, Time Machine (on my Time Capsule, 500GB) ran out of space while doing what seemed like an unusually large backup. For some reason it was not deleting old backups, or compressing the archive to create space, or decided it wanted to back up a huge amount of data for no real reason. In the end, after researching on various forums, I decided to wipe it clean and start over.
This worked for a month, then just after new year, it happened again, and I payed close attention to what it was doing. It began backing up data, estimated that there was around 140GB to update, and began. When the progress bar reached 140GB, it then continued backing up. The amount completed, and the amount to backup continued to rise together, ad infinitum, until all the space was used up and the backup failed.
I spent two days trying to sort it out, but each time it began to backup, the same thing happened. I removed my huge iTuned Media Library, thinking that it was trying to back that up again and again. I bought a new 1TB HD, and erased the Time Capsule, reset it, trashed Time Machine prefs, excluded a bunch of big files from the backup, and set it to backup on the new HD. It came up with about 69GB to backup, and completed. This was all achieved via the ethernet connection. This morning, backups continued as normal.
Today I went out, came back, connected via wifi. A backup began for 2.9GB. I thought this was a bit large, but as I'd been playing around with something on iMovie, I assumed it was probably OK.
Now it is happening again. It got to 2.9GB - then continued backing up. It is now at 8.75 and counting.
This makes absolutely no sense. It only happens with my MacBook as far as I can tell, and it is driving me up the wall.
Could there be a conflict with some software? Could it be a system error? I'm running out of things to try to fix it.
MacBook 2.16 Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.6.5)
