Time Machine 'tmutil compare' problems

[imom]

Hi everyone, my Time Machine backup sizes are huge despite me not touching anything. Latest backup was ~20 GB with only some web browsing since the last backup an hour earlier. Crazy. So I decided to do something about it.

First step was to find out what was in that past backup which was so huge (and they are always much larger than they should be). Sounds like a job for 'tmutil compare'. Unfortunately, that's where things begin to fall apart. In order to use the 'compare' tool to compare the most recent backup with the previous backup, I need paths to both backups.

(I should mention that I am using a Samba network drive which results in a sparsebundle.)

However, the 'tmutil latestbackup' and 'tmutil listbackups' tools don't generate paths, as they should. The output looks like "2022-05-12-154038.backup", that's all. The compare tool doesn't accept these and there are no directories which correspond to these names in the sparsebundle so I can't build a path to a non-existent file/directory.

Any idea how to get the compare tool to work? Any other way to figure out why on earth my backups are so large?

 

[gilby101]

Any idea how to get the compare tool to work? Any other way to figure out why on earth my backups are so large?

For any other way, I use BackupLoupe for all such comparisons. It builds and maintains a database of all your backups and all the files and folder in them. Invaluable for tracking sizes, drilling down to what is causing large backups, and for finding long lost files. The first scan will take a long time - leave it running overnight.

Regarding your use of tmutil, the list of backups looks fine, you just(!) need to get the correct compare command. I am not sure it helps, but be aware that many recipes you will find on the web are correct for HFS+ format TM, but not for APFS.

With a DAS, I use a command like:
`tmutil compare /Volumes/.timemachine/8A...87/2022-05-14-055445.backup/2022-05-14-055445.backup /Volumes/.timemachine/8A...87/2022-05-14-045502.backup/2022-05-14-045502.backup`

I got the paths by right click, option, copy as path name.

 

[imom]

For any other way, I use BackupLoupe for all such comparisons.

Thanks for the suggestion. I will take a look.

 

[imom]

For any other way, I use BackupLoupe for all such comparisons.

I tried it out but it doesn't seem to work with sparsebundles. It listed the backup but couldn't list the snapshots.