Why does Time Machine suddenly make huge backups

[Pagemakers]

For no apparent reason Time Machine is doing a 41GB backup. Why?

I can see no reason for this.

 

[Macman45]

Usually it's because you have installed new software, or a major update has been applied.

Ituns apps can be the culprit too, but TM also takes hourly / daily / weekly and monthly backups. The latter can be larger from time to time.

 

[ChristianVirtual]

Have a look if you backup your mobile device backups; don't have a path right now on hand but those can be lots of GB.

There is a nice little program in MAS called DaisyDisk; that gives a good overview on your Mac storage; with that I "found" my mobile backup sizes

 

[Pagemakers]

Ok, but I haven't really done anything in the last week or so and on the machine concerned I don't use iTunes.

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...And again no mobile device backups. It's my MBA.

 

[Macman45]

It's also possible to exclude items from backups to from system>preferences>Time Machine. I have a whopping X-Plane installation (75GB) which i don't allow TM to backup. I have a backup copy on my R4, so there is no need to take up all that space on my TC.

 

[richard.mac]

Download TimeTrackar from http://www.charlessoft.com and you can use it to see the total size of each backup, which files were backed up backups and their size.

 

[Pagemakers]

Thank you

 

[sim667]

I suddenly found that mine was unable to backup to the allocated drive the other day.

I'd forgotten I'd installed another 2tb hard drive and it was trying to back that up too

 

[Kasalic]

For no apparent reason Time Machine is doing a 41GB backup. Why?

I can see no reason for this.

You may know this, but certain types of files, databases are prime examples, can quickly fill a Time Machine hard drive up very quickly. This is because you can make a very small change to a record, however the system will insist on backing up the entire file again.

For this reason it is recommended that you back up these files differently and exclude them from TM.

I appreciate this might not be the cause of your problem, but figured I'd throw it out there as no one else had yet.

 

[Pagemakers]

Thank you for your input.

It's not a problem for me, I was just intrigued as to why the occasional massive backup.