Time Machine used up all my 500gig space!

Only a few days ago I set up a brand new external HD to use just for TM. Now it is almost full!! What is going on here?

I have a .Mac iDisk and have it set to store & sync with a local copy on my iMac. My iDisk contains around 2GB of files, and this amount is therefore also used up on my iMac by the local copy which is stored as a disk image. With the current Apple servers / iDisk sync malfunctions going on my iMac has not been able to synchronise the local copy with the online version - but behind the scenes it has been doing something...
I noticed a recent Time Machine backup taking a lot longer than normal, and checked the TM System Prefs to see how much was being copied - over 200GB! Now TM has been running smoothly for several days, and I knew I hadn't generated anywhere near 200GB worth of changes since the previous hourly backup. A quick investigation revealed that the available space on my iMac HD had also reduced by ~200GB, and I tracked the problem down to the local iDisk disk image (located at ~/Library/FileSync/). Instead of ~2GB it was now 207GB..! And growing at a rate of 8MB every minute or so.
TM backs up the local iDisk disk image by default along with everything else - so it was of course now dutifully backing up a 200GB (and growing) file. As it's a disk image it presumably gets backed up in its entirety every time a change is made to anything within, thus my large LaCie drive allocated for backing up to was going to get very full, very quickly.
The point of all this is, of course, if you're using iDisk with iDisk sync on, just check that the same isn't happening to you right now and using up all that backup drive space...

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    Hi - I had to move my data to a different machine and so I prepared a different iMac (early 2008). This is what I did:
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    Just found this info in the Backup dashboard widget:
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  • Does time machine back up all settings too?

    I have a problem with my imac and the internet- after having it looked at at the genius bar it was found that I have transferred all of my prior systems settings into this one (uncovered some from 2003) It was suggested that I do a complete system restore to get all of these older settings out.
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    magneto10 wrote:
    I have a problem with my imac and the internet- after having it looked at at the genius bar it was found that I have transferred all of my prior systems settings into this one (uncovered some from 2003) It was suggested that I do a complete system restore to get all of these older settings out.
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  • Time Machine uses 77 MB every hour?

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    If you are looking at the individual hourly or daily folders on your Time Machine destination drive the folder size will be deceptively large and not correct.
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