Time Machine acting randomly... (Ignoring exclusions)

Hello everyone,
I've been an happy TM user since August, when I bought my 1TB Time Capsule. Everything used to work fine, until this morning when, for some reason unknown, TM decided it was time to make a 177GB backup. According to the TM prefpane, the full size of a backup for my drive is 102GB, but I let it do it anyways because I thought that it probabily knew what it was doing. I was wrong, as it successfully wasted almost 200GB on my Time Capsule.
Noticing this, I used Backup Loupe to inspect what was being backed up and to my surprise, it backed up everything on my disk, including all those folders that I had excluded. I proceeded to delete the sparsebundle on the Time Capsule (that was now over 450 and there was no way to reduce it even by deleting the backups of the excluded items) and to remove all Time Machine settings, and start anew. The thing is that TM is still refusing to consider my exclusions: it begins by saying that it is excluding 200 thousand and more items, then goes on backing up the 102GB that should be backed up, and the CONTINUES to back up, incrementing both the data transfered and the total data to be transfered (I'm now at 136GB of 136GB). I'm suspecting that it's simply ignoring my exclusions, but I don't want it to! Do anyone has any advice? I don't want to switch to a third party backup solution, it has always worked before and I see no reason why it should sto working properly now.
Thanks everyone,
Take Care
Juan
Message was edited by: juandemarco

Hello, and thank you for your reply. I managed, i think, to solve the issue. One thing at a time.
I had already read your comprehensive guide, and it was following those tips that I tried the full reset (in fact, as stated, I deleted both the preferences and the sparsebundle). Things didn't change, though. Also, I had verified my internal drive and everything was fine.
The problem was that during the first backup, I renamed the backup volume from Time Machine's Backups to Backup, since this is a feature that TM is supposed to support: it stopped, renamed and got back to work from where it left off. Only, it began to ignore the exclusions and that backup was forever tainted. I tried not renaming the volume and everything works fine. That, and also i DID NOT exclude the folder /Users/Shared. This are the only two differences from previous failed attemps.
What's not clear, though, is why, before I had to go through all this work, TM began to ignore my exclusions in the first place. I had a backup volume since august, and it always worked fine until the other day, when, without me doing anything (the computer was left untouched since the previous backup, in fact) it begun to backup the whole disk, ignoring exclusions. That is something that will probabily happen again - even if after some time - and it's very likely due to a bug in TM's code.
Thank you for your help, if you can make out something helpful from my experience please, let me know
Take care
Juan

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