Missing backups/lack of space with Time Machine

Question

Hello,
I am having trouble with Time Machine since I updated to Mavericks.  Time Machine tells me that I have insufficient space on my external hardrive (1TB) even though in Time Machine it only has one full backup.  If I Get Info on the drive it says Capacity 999.72GB, Available 71.37GB and Used 928,35GB. 
In Finder I used to be able to delete older backups if needed but generally Time Machine did what it was supposed to - it overwrote old backups.  I can no longer find the files to delete and TM only says I have one full backup.
How can I uncover these, what appear to be, hidden files? Something must be there as I have no space left!
The external hard drive is 2TBp partioned, I also seem to have lost all of the data from the non-TM partition, which is not great either.
Please let me know if you need any other information.
Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

Do you use virtualization software, such as VMware, Parallels, or VirtualBox?
The virtualization software creates a large virtual-disk container that is constantly changing, so it has to be backed up every time Time Machine runs. That will quickly fill up any backup destination.
You should exclude the virtual-disk file(s) from your Time Machine backups. To do that, click the Options button in the Time Machine preference pane. Back up the files on the virtual disk from within the guest system, using a native backup application.
A compromise solution is to create a "snapshot" of the virtual machine in the virtualization software (not a Time Machine snapshot.) That will give you a single large file that never changes and only has to be backed up once. All the subsequent changes will be stored in a new file that's initially much smaller, but will grow over time. You should still exclude that file from TM backup. If you ever need to restore the VM from Time Machine, you'll have a working setup, which will make it easy for you to restore the rest of the data from within the guest system.
Another common cause of large TM snapshots is native OS X disk images. If you store a lot of data on one or more writable disk images, they should be in "sparsebundle" format, which will be backed up much more efficiently than any other format. Also be aware that disk image files are not backed up at all while the image is mounted. Make sure you unmount the image often so it can be backed up. If you ever restore, you will, of course, lose all changes made since the last backup. Consider eliminating large read/write disk images from your workflow, if possible.