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mathcolo

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 14, 2008
860
16
Boston
Hey everyone, every hour Time Machine is copying over around 68 MB of stuff over to my networked backup drive. I'm just working on a document in Google Docs though, and I'm absolutely positive ~68 MB wasn't changed. Where can I see what it's backing up?

I Googled this problem and found some old articles that lead to solutions with dead links, by the way. Very sad :(
 

Hammie

macrumors 68000
Mar 17, 2009
1,550
76
Wash, DC Metro
It would be nice to have the option to see what files are being backed up. Sort of like how CCC shows the files as they are being read.
 

mathcolo

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 14, 2008
860
16
Boston
Try BackupLoupe. It'll show you what's in every backup TM does.

Hey everyone, just a quick update for this thread. I finally got around to dealing with this problem this morning, and BackupLoupe just saved my life. As it turns out, Sparrow and Chrome were responsible: So to anyone that reads this thread in the future, and you use Sparrow or Google Chrome, consider excluding the following folders:

~/Library/Containers/com.sparrowmailapp.sparrow
~/Library/Application Support/Google
 

mrapplegate

macrumors 68030
Feb 26, 2011
2,818
8
Cincinnati, OH
Hey everyone, just a quick update for this thread. I finally got around to dealing with this problem this morning, and BackupLoupe just saved my life. As it turns out, Sparrow and Chrome were responsible: So to anyone that reads this thread in the future, and you use Sparrow or Google Chrome, consider excluding the following folders:

~/Library/Containers/com.sparrowmailapp.sparrow
~/Library/Application Support/Google

It's not a mystery, TM backs up everything. As you figured out just using applications you generate a lot of data being written to the cache or log files or ~/Library/Application Support, etc.

The exclusion tab of TM is your friend :D
 

mathcolo

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 14, 2008
860
16
Boston
It's not a mystery, TM backs up everything. As you figured out just using applications you generate a lot of data being written to the cache or log files or ~/Library/Application Support, etc.

The exclusion tab of TM is your friend :D

Well yes, I know that, but the idea that Time Machine does delta backups falls apart when app developers use binary blob data storage methods. It's another reason for me to ditch Sparrow...
 

mrapplegate

macrumors 68030
Feb 26, 2011
2,818
8
Cincinnati, OH
Well yes, I know that, but the idea that Time Machine does delta backups falls apart when app developers use binary blob data storage methods. It's another reason for me to ditch Sparrow...

Right, but I mostly just plug it in and forget. These days backing up ~68MB is nothing, and in the grand scheme of things your TM backup will never exceed your hard drive size haha. My thinking is I can at the vary least expect my TM backup to reach 500GB someday, nothing more. I have 2 TB plugged into it, so I don't worry.
 

Krazy Bill

macrumors 68030
Dec 21, 2011
2,985
3
It would be nice to have the option to see what files are being backed up. Sort of like how CCC shows the files as they are being read.
On this note I only changed the title of a Folder and now CCC seems to thing everything inside this folder requires backing up. all 1GB.
 

mathcolo

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 14, 2008
860
16
Boston
These days backing up ~68MB is nothing...

Well, perhaps 68MB once is nothing. But what about when the same file, that size, is getting backed up every hour for 15 hours a day? That's about 1GB per day, which just isn't necessary for a useless Sparrow database. All my mail's stored in the cloud...
 

mrapplegate

macrumors 68030
Feb 26, 2011
2,818
8
Cincinnati, OH
Well, perhaps 68MB once is nothing. But what about when the same file, that size, is getting backed up every hour for 15 hours a day? That's about 1GB per day, which just isn't necessary for a useless Sparrow database. All my mail's stored in the cloud...

Good point. Pointless for sure.
 
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