HUGE Time Machine Backups...What is being backed up??

[olletsocmit]

I have time machine disabled b/c backing up every hour was just wayyy too much! I manually back up by right clicking on the icon and choosing backup now once a day or after big changes. I backed up yesterday and it was a large backup. all i have done since then was add about 900mb of video to my mac. I just went ahead and backed-up it up now and noticed that its very large back-up again.... Its becoming a trend that every time i backup, its backup up quite large files. What the hell is it backup up if it was all backuped up just yesterday.

This is how much its backing up now, after only changing 900MB....

 

[sim667]

Has your video editing created a lot of temporary files? Or have you pulled loads of raw footage onto the computer from a camera since the last backup? Ie done an import in iMovie or something?

 

[jbarley]

Why not just change the backup Schedule to something more to your likings with TimeMachineEditor?
Here is my schedule...
and a copy of my TM backup log showing a very minimal amount of files needing to be backed up.

 

[olletsocmit]

that is so weird, mine are huge... no i am not doing any video editing at all. I had that 14gb backup when i posted 8 hours ago and i am backing up now, 8 hours later and its backing up another 4.87gb... what the hell is is backing up!

 

[olletsocmit]

I also noticed that i have time machine disabled and only backup manually, but every 12 hours or so it is still auto backing up... super confussed. is there a file i can edit or look as to see if the settings have been modified.

 

[jbarley]

From the top Finder menubar select "Go->Go to Folder" and enter "/private/var/vm" (without the quotes.
Do you see a "SleepImage" file and if so how big is it?
This file commonly changes every time your computer sleeps so TM will backup the total file.

 

[olletsocmit]

From the top Finder menubar select "Go->Go to Folder" and enter "/private/var/vm" (without the quotes.
Do you see a "SleepImage" file and if so how big is it?
This file commonly changes every time your computer sleeps so TM will backup the total file.

yes i do... its 4.89 GB! why so big. what can i do

 

[olletsocmit]

....and again. i was sitting here online and its auto backing-up. its disabled, how does it keep randomly backing up. this is so confusing!

 

[jbarley]

The easiest way is to exclude the SleepImage file from TM's backup list, take a look here for more information.

 

[olletsocmit]

From the top Finder menubar select "Go->Go to Folder" and enter "/private/var/vm" (without the quotes.
Do you see a "SleepImage" file and if so how big is it?
This file commonly changes every time your computer sleeps so TM will backup the total file.

what exactly is this sleep file? if i do not back up this folder, what will be missing from my time machine backups?

 

[zorinlynx]

SleepImage should be excluded from the backup.

Do you have any virtual machines, from VirtualBox or Parallels or the like? These tend to have large disk image files which change constantly when the VM is booted, resulting in huge backups.

 

[jbarley]

what exactly is this sleep file? if i do not back up this folder, what will be missing from my time machine backups?

You could ask this question in Google and you'd get, amongst others an answer like this one.

 

[olletsocmit]

I deleted it and also excluded it with a few other things from my backups.

 

[jbarley]

I deleted it and also excluded it with a few other things from my backups.

Any noticeable improvement in the size of your TM backups?

 

[olletsocmit]

Any noticeable improvement in the size of your TM backups?

actually No. still having huge backups. but its nice to have some of the stuff i didnt need excluded now.