Large incremental back-ups on time machine

Since the last system update (10.10.3 (14D136)) last week, my time machine has started making large hourly back-ups. They seem to be between 100mb and 500mb per hour which is far more than any files I have changed or downloaded. Normally the time machine finishes in about 5 minutes, but its pretty much going continually now. I generally work with documents and office stuff in pages, keynote etc, not with huge images or video so there is no way I can be so productive!
At first I thought it might just be the system update from last week, having changed a lot of files, but I would expect that to be over after a day or two. This seems now to be a pattern, and its causing problems by eating my wi-fi bandwidth.
Anybody have any ideas as to why the incremental hourly back-up is so large every time? How can I find out which files are changing?
Regards from sunny Scandinavia
SimonC
I use a macbook air, from Spring 2014

Can you explain your observations that lead you to believe the weeklies do not work? Monthly? I don't think there is a monthly "stash." It's hourly for 24 hours, daily for one month, and weekly until disk is full.
I'm looking back at my archive and it seems to have logical date-time stamped folders. The weeklies do not continuously adjust day-by-day based on the end date of the one-month daily backups. If the oldest weekly backup is 1 March, the next oldest is 8 March, and then 15 March. Those dates will not change.
I don't know technically how Time Machine merges the backups.

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Removing Corrupt Back-ups in Time Machine

I had a serious crash yesterday. While trying to install XCode the machine locked up and I had to reboot by turning it off using the power button. When I restarted I got the folder icon with the question mark. Rebooted using the installation disk and after restoring using the latest time machine back-up I successfully booted the machine, however, my user file, one of 3, would not open, giving the message that the File Vault pass word was not accepted due to an error. I reverted to an earlier back-up and fixed all the problems with minimal data loss. It seems that whatever corruption caused the problem was backed up on the late time machine back-ups.
So, is it safe to simply delete those later back-ups? Time Machine really saved me here and I don't want to make a mistake by deleting something I shouldn't.

Hello M:
I would be guessing if I suggested what would happen….
However, if you decide to delete some of your Time Machine backups, do it INSIDE Time Machine. This is a slow process (one at a time), but it is the safe way of removing old backups.
Barry

I manually deleted back-ups from Time Machine and now I can't empty the trash

I manually deleted back-ups from Time Machine and now I can't empty the trash.

Using Finder (deleting Time Machine backups) to manage Time Machine files is a mistake. The remedy is somewhat easy, but you will lose all the files on that TM drive.
If there is nothing elese on the Time Machine drive, try reformatting the drive with Disk Utility. This will effectively remove the files from that drive from the trash. If you have files on this drive, temporarily copy the files to another drive, then reformat the TM drive.

IPhoto Back-Ups From Time Machine/Time Capsule Are Useless.

I use iPhoto constantly and I use a 2TB Time Capsule with Time Machine on and nothing omitted from it's back ups.
When trying to recover my iPhoto library today with Time Machine using both the Time Machine Interface and the Finder, I kept getting incomplete albums that were missing photos, even if they were versions created after the photos were imported. I was stumped.
A little research uncovered this support article from Apple: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4116
Summary:
+iPhoto libraries are not backed up by Time Machine if iPhoto is running during the back up process.+
Oh No. I leave my iPhoto application open constantly.
I bought the best MacBook Pro money could by with 8GB of RAM so I could have multiple applications open for my design work which can sometimes have me grinding away for hours, if not days on multiple projects, all using iPhoto and Photoshop.
There is no "Save" function in iPhoto. Does this mean I am supposed to periodically quit iPhoto, perform a Time Machine back up, then restart iPhoto?
Does that sound reasonable to anyone?
This is an absolute horror show for me.
If anyone knows where freshly imported photos go if they don't end up in the iPhoto library's back-up because iPhoto was running while the back up occurred, I would love to know. Is there a photo-limbo?

Dear Joel, I'm not an expert but I believe that it is simply impossible backing up something on progress; in other words since TM works through an incremental back up of the file, I think it's mandatory to stop working on a file before the copy of it is performed, that's to say you must close iPhoto.

Back-ups on Time Machine - How Do They Work?

Time Machine backs up every hour, then at the end of the day it exchanges the hourly backups for a daily backup. That works fine.
BUT, according to the directions, at the end of the week, it is supposed to replace the daily stashes with one weekly stash, and eventually, the weekly stashes with one monthly stash. The daily works; the others do not.
Am I misunderstanding the process here and it really doesn't do all these exchanges of smaller backups for a larger one, or is something wrong that I need to fix?
Thanks....TM is new to me and I'm not quite able to figure it out.

Can you explain your observations that lead you to believe the weeklies do not work? Monthly? I don't think there is a monthly "stash." It's hourly for 24 hours, daily for one month, and weekly until disk is full.
I'm looking back at my archive and it seems to have logical date-time stamped folders. The weeklies do not continuously adjust day-by-day based on the end date of the one-month daily backups. If the oldest weekly backup is 1 March, the next oldest is 8 March, and then 15 March. Those dates will not change.
I don't know technically how Time Machine merges the backups.

How do I delete time back ups in time machine?

I used to be able to go into time machine and delete individual back ups. Now nothing happens. Help.

wandering wrote:
I used to be able to go into time machine and delete individual back ups.
See Here > Should I delete old backups? If so, How?
From Here > http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
From Pondini’s excellent Information Here...
http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html

Finding back ups on time machine

Hi there,
How do I change my time machine settings to view back ups older than a month?
Thanks

duck321 wrote:
It's possible. I backed up my laptop, then I backed up two external hard drives. do you think might have caused the problem? I'm not sure as all three were appearing in the timeline files until after they'd been there a month.
It does sound like the Time Capsule's disk got full, sometime in the last month, and TM had to delete old backups.
Or as Bob says, your backups got corrupted and TM had to start over. See if the message in #C13 ofTime Machine - Troubleshooting looks familiar.
How much data is on all 3 of these disks, and how big is your Time Capsule (less anything else on it)?
I can't see an option for browse other time machine disks - when I right click it just brings up the applications window...?
Right-clicking the TM icon in your Dock should show this:
If not, click the TM icon in your menubar; you should see this:
Click and hold the Option key, and Enter Time Machine should change to Browse Other Time Machine Disks.

No Access to back-ups on time machine

When I check my Time Machine, I can't access the old back-ups, since update to Mavericks. All I see is black screens in the timeline...

Give it a couple of minutes. The index just needs to catch up to go back to the screen you want to look at. This could happen before Mavericks.

I'm deleting old back ups in time machine but it's not freeing up any space

Time machine cannot back up because it is full and is not deleting old backups.
So I delete back ups myself and it doesn't fire up any space!

The problem is that the backups of the old computer are still on the volume, and Time Machine won't delete them to make room for more backups of the new one.
At the top level of the folder Backups.backupdb, there should be a subfolder with the name of each computer that has ever been backed up to that volume. Delete the one with the name of the old computer by dragging it to the Trash and emptying. I warn you, though, that sometimes the Trash will fail to empty, and then you'll probably have to erase the volume and start over. Do this only if you have at least one other complete backup of all current data (which you should have anyway.)

Combining back ups in Time Machine...possible?

hello all, I need some help with a Time Machine back up.
I am running a MBP 15" on OS 10.6.8 and a HD failure while traveling for a couple weeks.
I backup'd before I left on the trip, so that's not an issue. I worked for two weeks on the road and basically lost that data from the damaged HD(unless it's recoverable from the dead HD).
I installed a replacement drive after that two week period and now have been working on the new drive. I have now back up'd the new drive as well.
What I'd like to know is it possible to combine the data from the back ups I have from before my trip with the new data on the replacement drive, essentially making a new version of my drive up to date, (minus the two weeks I lost).
thanks for any help and if I missed anything to help solve the issue...let me know.
Eric
15, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 2.6 GHz Intel C2D

Does this help?
http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Works.html
Regards,
Colin R.

How do I delete old back ups in Time Machine?

Is there a way to selectively delete back ups on TM?

start Time machine, go to the backup you want, click on the "gear" action button in finder toolbar and select "delete backup".

I'm losing all my recent work and back-ups in Time Machine as well!?

Hi,
I've only recently started having this problem with my G5 Dual 2 GHZ PowerPC. I'm running Mac OS X 10.5.8.
It has only recently started to freeze - sometimes when I open up applications for the first time of the day.
I'm a cartoonist and working mainly in Photoshop CS2. After the crash I reboot and all the files I've worked
on won't open up - I'm getting this messages: 'There was a problem reading the layer data. Read the composite instead?'
Then 'Could not complete your request because an unexpected end-of-file was encountered!'
So I've lost all the work for the day when this happens. And to make matters worse all backups in Time Machine had
disappeared! So there is no backup.
Any help appreciated. Thank you very much in advance.
Richard

For starters my hard drive is nearly full - I did delete quite a lot of stuff the other day but probably need to do more.
Your startup drive should be no more than 50% of formatted capacity and, if a small drive, have at least 40 GB of free space for proper performance of OS X and applications.
For a large drive as a boot volume, use the 50% rule of thumb.....
I don't know what a dedicated scratch drive is - but I'll find out.
Without a dedicated scratch drive, your system fills the startup drive with temporary files needed for the graphics software, eventually filling and leaving nothing for OS X to run on.
Scratch Disks
OS X will easily use 10-15 GB of "virtual memory" (this is written to the startup hard drive} and CS applications will need another 10-15 GB.
Start manipulating files and adding effects, and a 100 MB file can easily have 10-20 GB of scratch files created in a prolonged session.
Get a new, internal 1 TB drive 7200 RPM drive for scratch.
External drives can be used, but internal is faster; better performance.
If your startup drive is the original drive, get 2 new drives........ replace the startup drive and add the scratch drive.
Western Digital Black drives are most highly recommended.
Hitachi drives are also excellent.
Do not buy any type of "Green" drive.
I have a Iomega 500 gb external drive - that only has 9.3 gb available. This is set to hourly backups.
The loss of backups is likely due to the lack of free space on the startup drive.
This overly full condition disallows the systems ability to read, compare, compile and write the files to disk.
Filling a non-boot volume to greater than 90% of formatted capacity greatly hampers performance and increases the potential for data corruption and loss.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'How is it interfaced?' (Forgive me please!)
No worries.
My question is how is the drive connected; USB, Firewire, other?
USB is the least reliable due to bus demands of the system and data transfer interrupts that occur during normal operation.
Firewire is much more robust.
I did purchase a 1 TB capacity My Passport Essential SE portable drive the other day. Would it be better to use Time Machine on that?
As much as I like the internal drives of Western Digital, I dislike the ready made external drives from them, Seagate and Hitachi.
BUT, anything is better than nothing, though, for Time Machine, a 1TB drive is good enough for up to a 640 GB drive backup.
Plan on 1.5x capacity of a TM drive compared to the source drive.
I haven't repaired my hard drives lately - so will do this.
Good, but free up some space on the boot volume.

Delta back ups in Time Machine?

Does Time Machine use the new delta update technology similar to the delta updates the Mac App Store uses? I mean, does it back up at the bit level or file level?

Does this help?
http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Works.html
Regards,
Colin R.

HT3275 how do i delete old Back ups from time machine off my mac ?

I recently Tried to delete back ups from my external drive from time capsule i moved old backups to the trash but when i try to empty my frash they wont go away
i keep getting this message........... There are some locked items in the Trash. Do you want to remove all the items, including the locked ones, or just the unlocked items? iwent to get info and i set them both to read and write but i still get the same Message ,
Please help
Gbasscleff

More info here http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1526

HT1338 cannot access old back ups on time machine

I cannot access my old backups on time machine, using Gdrive as a back up

Hi.
Are you using the time Machine app to attempt this... or are you simply opening the backup drive in the Finder? This you cannot do.
To access the data that is backed up to your external drive via Time Machine, do this...
• First, navigate in the Finder to the folder that should contain the data you wish to retrieve.
• Now, starting in the Menu bar at the top of the screen... click the Time Machine icon > Enter Time Machine.
The Time Machine will appear, with its display of copies of your Finder window leading back into the distant past.
• Using the timeline along the right edge of the screen, select a date or point in time as far back as you need to go until Time Machine dislplays the file version that you wish to retrieve. At the bottom of the screen, TM will show the backup date of the current window contents.
• Select your file in the display window and click Restore in the bottom right corner.
Time Machine will now move a copy of the backed up file back into place in your Finder window as it closes the Time Machine app.
See more here... Mac 101: Time Machine
I hope this is helpful.

Large incremental back-ups on time machine

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