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Lankyman

macrumors 68020
Original poster
May 14, 2011
2,083
832
U.K.
As the title alludes to I am experiencing a Time Machine back up puzzle. I purchased my new Mini on the first day of store release i.e. Thursday and decided to use a spare Maxtor external USB HD I have, capacity 750 gig. The Mini has the 500 gig HD and I have currently used approx 180 gig split between the Mac and my Windows VM. Time Machine appears to spend most of the time backing up. To give you some idea I have already had the warning the HD is full and the oldest back ups have been deleted to make room. Although I have done some tidying up since the install, e.g. moving files around and deleting duplicates etc. plus there has already been a couple of software updates to Lion this sort of usage seems ridiculous. Anyone have any ideas?
 
If you haven't excluded your VM's from the Time Machine backup, then this is likely your problem.

AFAIK, Time Machine sees your VM's as one large file, and therefore, whenever anything changes within that VM, which will be anytime you run it, the entire multi-gigabyte file will be backed up again.

Try excluding your VM's from Time Machine, and see what happens.
 
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If you haven't excluded your VM's from the Time Machine backup, then this is likely your problem.

AFAIK, Time Machine sees your VM's as one large file, and therefore, whenever anything changes within that VM, which will be anytime you run it, the entire multi-gigabyte file will be backed up again.

Try excluding your VM's from Time Machine, and see what happens.

Ah! so if I'm reading what you say is correct then every time I simply access the VM even though I'm not actually changing anything TM thinks I have and backs it up again? I have made a clone of the VM just to be on the safe side and have done a backup using Acronis this morning so I will exclude the file and see if that does the trick - cheers for that.
 
Ah! so if I'm reading what you say is correct then every time I simply access the VM even though I'm not actually changing anything TM thinks I have and backs it up again? I have made a clone of the VM just to be on the safe side and have done a backup using Acronis this morning so I will exclude the file and see if that does the trick - cheers for that.

No problem!......I hope that solves it for you :)
 
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