Time Machine Back-up Taking Too much Space

I have only been a Mac owner for a little over three months.
I set up Time Machine with an external hard drive three months ago. My Mac hard drive has used 64.16 GB of space out of 249 GB. Ny external drive (300 GB) however was full and deleting on its own in just 10 weeks. Three days ago I erased everything on the external drive and started over. After the first full back up, 50.61 GB of space was taken. Now three days later it is up to 102.54 GB. What am I doing wrong, or what do I need to do to correct.
This is a 'home use only' computer and daily changes are minimal.
Thanks for any feedback.
Roger

Hi mahlquist,
I have exactly the same problem on three macs running SL. Sometimes it simply wants to backup the whole drive instead of creating an incremental backup. The worst thing is that it deletes old backups first (when there is not enough space for an additional complete backup) without asking you if you want it to do that. So, the best solution is to deactivate the automatic backup in TM and start it manually only. Watch at the TM window, see what it is doing when the backup starts. When it starts to delete old backups, cancel the backup, restart your Mac and then try again. In most cases, TM then works again and creates incremental backups. Another bug is that sometimes it backups even folders that are in the list of excluded folders. I didn't manage to break TM of doing that. So I decided for a reinstall of SL on the machine that was affected.
This is one of the most annoying bugs in SL. TM is nearly unusable in SL. I also tried a complete wipe and install of SL to make sure that it wasn't the upgrade from Leopard that causes the broken TM. But this didn't solve the problem. In general, there are lots of bugs in SL. In the meantime, I would say that SL is one of the most annoying versions of OS X that Apple has ever released. Lots of bugs in such a manner are really new to me as a Mac user for many years.

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