Find out what time machine is backing up

Ok so i was using my mbp today and have my external drive plugged in. it is a 250GB western digital passport usb drive. i have 2 partitions one time machine (80gb) and one just for other files, mainly photographs. I needed an extra temporary partition so i went to shrink the partition that was just normal stuff and i kept telling me that it wouldn't complete with the error the disk had no free space. it shouldn't be a problem because its only changing a partition and it does have free space. this continued so i decided to shrink my time machine partition by about 1gb just to see if it would work. it didnt and it jammed so i unmounted and tried again. no joy. so i left it and the drive was working fine. however time machine has suddenly found 25gb of data it would like to back up. i have excluded some folders already from it and i excluded one or two other new things i thought might have been causing a bit of an issue, mind you none were that big. still no joy.
is there any way of seeing what it is backing up so i can exclude them or otherwise fix them?

alex.lyons wrote:
Ok so i was using my mbp today and have my external drive plugged in. it is a 250GB western digital passport usb drive. i have 2 partitions one time machine (80gb) and one just for other files, mainly photographs. I needed an extra temporary partition so i went to shrink the partition that was just normal stuff and i kept telling me that it wouldn't complete with the error the disk had no free space. it shouldn't be a problem because its only changing a partition and it does have free space.
this can actually be a problem depending on a situation. when you shrink a partition it looks for a contiguous piece of free space on that partition to remove it. if it can't find such piece due to disk fragmentation the process will fail. you should run repair disk on the external after a failed partitioning process to see if there was any file system damage.
this continued so i decided to shrink my time machine partition by about 1gb just to see if it would work. it didnt and it jammed so i unmounted and tried again. no joy. so i left it and the drive was working fine. however time machine has suddenly found 25gb of data it would like to back up. i have excluded some folders already from it and i excluded one or two other new things i thought might have been causing a bit of an issue, mind you none were that big. still no joy.
is there any way of seeing what it is backing up so i can exclude them or otherwise fix them?
No. the best you can do is to see what was backed up during the last backup.
use this [mac os x hint for this|http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080714124323976]. if you are not terminal savvy, read my instructions in the last comment in that link.

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