Is Time Machine pretty much useless?

My 500 GB filled up in no time, so I bought a 2 Terribyte unit. Now it is already almost full. Shouldn't the Time Machine software only be backing up changed files and new ones? It seems to be backing up my entire hard disk each time. It has about 200 GB on it.

It depends on what you do.. for instance if you have a virtual machine running windows.. everytime you boot into that partition and make changes, TM will backup the entire file.. it cannot see changes inside the file.. as you can imagine this causes very large backups that quickly fill the drive.
Setup the widget.. see A1
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
To determine what TM is actually backing up and why the backups are so big.
The way TM works is to fill the target disk .. this is expected.. once it is full it will thin the old backups..
But you would expect that to be a fairly long process on a large drive, unless you are changing large files on a daily or hourly basis.

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