Ridiculous Exaggeration of Time Machine Size-Where is Error?

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Ridiculous Exaggeration of Time Machine Size-Where is Error?

Recently my Time Machine drive installed in my MacPro tower (Model 4,1 early 2009 8-core 26 GB RAM)appeared to corrupt, reporting a total data size somewhat larger than the real data and as a consequence impediing ongoing backups. (Time Machine was set up only to backup a 320 GB boot drive (WD Raptor) onto a Seagate ES2 750 GB drive. It has been working fine for over a year. I fiddled with this for a while trying to see if I could fix the problem with Apple Disk Utilities, then Disk Warrior, then Techtool Pro and Drive Genius. No joy. So I decided I'd just start fresh with a newly reformated Caviar Black 2TB drive that had had a full week of no-issue burn-in prior to actual use.

The initial backup was frankly bizarre. As I say my boot drive is 320 GB, or 299 GB real capacity that is using about 194 GB. Finder reported the initial Time Machine back-up file as being 2.08 TB which is clearly impossible no matter how many drives it backed up up given the capactiy of that empty drive as 1.8TB. Even more bizarrely while the machine calculates the Backups.backupdb as 2.08 TB it shows that the folder inside for the drive backed up is even larger 2.23 TB. Both are clearly impossible on a 1.,8TB capacity drive which also reports that though it is overlload by more than 0.4 TB still has 1.49 TB available.

Two potential complicating variables are that there were other drives attached which I possibly had not excluded from the time machine plus I had other manually backed-up data on that Time Machine drive.

So I eliminated those, disconnecting all other drives and ensuring that I ran TIme machine without involving any additional manual backup files.

Same result.

Bad RAM? bad Logic Board? Two bad drives a previously rock solid enterprise grade drive as well as a good quality new and burned-in drive ? (unlikely IMHO)

Unfortunately as I bought this MacPro used about a year ago it did not come with its version of Apple Hardware Test. I've run MemTest (Rembr actually) as well as the RAM test in Techtools Pro and Digilloydtools. None appear to reveal any problems.

What gives?

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), FC Studio 3

Posted on Nov 18, 2012 10:27 AM

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Answer 1

zapmeister Author

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Nov 19, 2012 2:25 PM in response to zapmeister

Bump...

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Answer 2

sanjampet

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Nov 19, 2012 4:23 PM in response to zapmeister

There was an update a couple of weeks ago that addressed run away TM issues, check to install it.

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Answer 3

zapmeister Author

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Nov 19, 2012 8:01 PM in response to sanjampet

Thanks, but nothing is coming up in Software Update for this machine. Is there a special place I need to look for that update?

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Answer 4

Nov 20, 2012 4:16 AM in response to zapmeister

http://pondini.org/TM/9.html

http://pondini.org/TM/D8.html

To be going on with.

Well worth reading the whole "how it works" section as well (go to home page)

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Answer 5

zapmeister Author

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Nov 20, 2012 8:32 AM in response to noondaywitch

Thank you "noondaywitch", thank you very much for directing me to that very fine resource: http://pondini.org.

I'm sure I will visit it regularly from here-on-in.

However, to be clear my back-up isn't actually really large. It is merely being reported as ridiculously large in a get-info and under the size column.

In the original example of this, according to the remaining capacity indicated in the bottom of the finder window, a rough calculation of the remaining availalble space after the backup suggested that the backup was approxiately the correct size. The reported number of the size of the backup (2.08 TB) was an impossible figure greater than the capacity of the drive (1.8TB).

I've since thrown out that data, reformated the drive and done another backu from scratch and this time it's even more crazy, 4.46 TB that it says it is squishing onto a 1.8TB drive but not at the bottom Finder is indicating that there is 1.81 TB space remaining on that 1.8TB drive after stuffing 4.46TB of backup. One doesn't need to be Mr. Spock to recognize that this is illogical.

Here's a screenshot:

I see in Pondoni.org there are instructions to do a complete reset of TM. I shall try that next, but I'm still worried something in the computer's logic board has gone amiss.

Meanwhile, any other thoughts?

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Answer 6

Nov 20, 2012 9:10 AM in response to zapmeister

Pondini does mention the phenomenon; http://pondini.org/TM/Works.html (the white boxout in the 'hard links bit).

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