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Mountain Lion: Time Machine Backups Get Very Big!

This weekend I upgraded from Lion to Mountain Lion, and most things work fine. I use an USB hardrive for backups, it's the same volume I used under Lion. Mountain Lion was able to continue using it, so I did not lose the history of my documents. So far, so good.


But: From time to time backups get really big. One example: This morning the backup that finished at 10:30 was about 50 MB at size, which is ok. The next backup started at 11:15 (and is still in progress), and while backing up, the estimated size grows and grows. Currently it's about 26,55 GB estimated, with 24 GB already backed up. But I did not produce more than 26GB of new or changed files, I just visited some websites, read news in Reeder and read some emails with Mail.app.


I saw this behaviour several times since monday, which lead time machine to clean old backups (previously I had backups from March, now the oldest backup is from May). What causes time machine to think that there is so much data not backed up, and why doesn't time machine know the size of the backup before copying the files, as it did in Lion?


Any suggestions?


Marcus

Macbook Pro 15, Mac OS X (10.7.2), 4 GB RAM, 512MB Video RAM. 320 GB Harddrive

Posted on Aug 9, 2012 2:50 AM

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56 replies

Aug 10, 2012 11:18 PM in response to Marcus Muench1

I have something similar. On three of the last 4 days, I have one TM backup which is about 56GB. And this is when I have not (knowingly) done anything to create 56GB data.


But, I have found something very odd. I have a large backup today. I then look at the previous hour's backup - it is missing /Applications, /System, /Library, etc. (it does have /Users and /opt). Given that, it is not surprising that the following backup is very big when it needs to redo /Applications, etc. (about 56GB).


So the strange behaviour is not the big backup, but the small one that preceded it!!


The .Backup.log and .exclusions.plist (in the TM backup location) look normal (or should I say no different to any others). In partciular the .exclusuions.plist doesn't have extras.


The entries in system.log look normal to me, as well.


And today, the small backup was at 4:22 am when I was fast asleep.


Is your behaviour like this Marcus?

Aug 11, 2012 3:31 AM in response to Linc Davis

Yes, I use VMWare, and I know that changes in the virtual harddrives cause big changed files, it was also my first guess that it had somethig to do with that.


But I used VMWare under Lion, and did not cause such big changes. And the virtual harddrives are segmented into 2GB files, so that's no reason for backups for growing more than 60GB (all my virtual machines in sum are not that big!).


Also, between the backups I mentioned in my original post, I did not even start VMWare. I just read some mails and visited some websites I visit regularly.

Aug 11, 2012 3:44 AM in response to Gilby101

I cannot really confirm that now. The backup that was in progress grew up to 63GB and then my time machine harddrive was full, so time machine quit with the message "harddrive unexpectedly full". All following attempts to create a new backup failed, so I decided to clean the partition and start a new set of backups.


In the harddrive manager I saw that the harddrive had MBR partition sceme and not GUID, in other posts I read that that could cause some problems under Mountain Lion (those posts were about time machine backups and NAS, but maybe USB attached drives also make problems). So I changed that and created a fresh partition for time machine.


But as far as I remember I also noticed some of those folders you mentioned missing in some backups (but I am not 100% sure). I used GrandPerspective with filtered scan "no hard-links" on one of those backups where time machine backed up many gigabytes, and according to GrandPerspective the backup was only a few megabytes big (which was the expected size). So time machine under Mountain Lion is really confusing me.


I keep an eye on my new backup partition and Mountain Lions behaviour.

Oct 12, 2012 9:22 AM in response to Marcus Muench1

Hello,

I'm having the same problem and I do not have VMWare so I doubt it is related to VMWare.

I have an external 2TB USB disc set up for Backup and experience huge backups. Backing up once a week would result in backups over 170 GB each time. I have erased all backups and done a fresh backup on the disk which gave me my disk space back. And now I've done a second backup which took already a few hundred MB. I've tried it again and a third backup which I ran manually less than a minute after the previous would still backup 255 MB of data??? I think that's a Mountain Lion problem bc. before that I remember that when I wanted to backup before shutting down the computer but was not sure whether it had backed up or not and did backups where apparently nothing had changed only took a few kB!!! Any ideas?

Thanks!

Oct 19, 2012 1:22 PM in response to Marcus Muench1

I am having the same issue using a seagate 2TB gofex drive. I ran into this problem and ended up formatting the seagate last night. I hadn't made the connection to Mountain Lion until reading this post.


So after the format, i ran the TM backup and it backed up my 289 GB successfully and only took all night, but was pretty fast compared to before i formatted.


HOWEVER, 2 hours after it was done, i shut down and restarted.

I then tested the TM backup again and it said it was backing up 65GB!!!

i have done nothing on this computer all afternoon!!!!!


I would realy like to know what the issue is.

I only have one partition on my Mac and the seagate.


Only thing different is mountain lion, i guess.

i don't use VMware.

Oct 27, 2012 10:48 AM in response to acekz

have encountered the same problem 3 times!!! But I fix it today!!!!! This is what I did:


  1. turn off Time Machine
  2. eject and disconnect the external hard drive used for TM
  3. restart my computer
  4. Go to Library/Preferences and delete com.apple.TimeMachine.plist and com.apple.TimeMachine.plist.lockfile
    NOTE: this is not the Library under your user folder. Click Go on the Finder and select Computer. Select your hard drive and there is a Library folder for all users. Thats the one!
  5. Reconnect your TM disk. If the system asks if you want to use the disk for TM, say decide later.
  6. Open System Preferences > Time Machine and select the disk again. You will not see your previous backups, but they are there, don't worry.
  7. Set up again any exclusions you had before.
  8. Turn TM on and do a backup. In my case it was larger than the previous one but it may be due to the fact that I removed one of my previous exclusions.


Any way it went OK!!!!

Nov 5, 2012 7:10 AM in response to Marcus Muench1

I went with Jose Rodriguez Alvira's solution and it seems to have worked for me.


I had been using Time Machine with Snow Leopard (10.6.8) for well over a year with no problems, then the upgrade to Mountain Lion seemed to cause massive backups, some reaching well over 60GB.


Having installed TimeTracker, I checked the individual backups and it seems that, occasionally, TM would only backup my Users folder (no Applications, System folders, etc), meaning that the next backup would include all these folders from scratch.


By deleting the plist file (Macintosh HD - Library - Preferences - com.apple.TimeMachine.plist) and making sure it was deleted from the trash, I was able to continue doing normal backups.

Mountain Lion: Time Machine Backups Get Very Big!

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