Yosemite Time Machine memory leak chewing through memory?

I installed Yosemite 10.10 on my 27" iMac (Intel Core i5) with 12 GB of RAM. After plugging in my external drive to make a backup with Time Machine, I noticed the indicator in my menu bar from Memory Clean was red and showing less than 15 MB of free memory available! I ran Memory Clean to recover some memory while the backup was in progress and it made roughly 3 GB available. Then the rapid drop in available memory began again as Time Machine continued to back up 40+ GB of data.
When finished, the available memory was very slowly released and crept up to around 220 MB. After 5 minutes without seeing a major release of memory I then ran Memory Clean again and it made 1.96 GB free for the system to use.
Before the Yosemite upgrade I didn't have Memory Clean installed so I don't think I ever checked to see if system memory was being chewed through in such a massive way under Mavericks. Is this common or is this yet another memory leak associated with Yosemite?
EDIT: In case this might be helpful, the drive is a Seagate Backup Plus 2 TB USB 3.0.

Similar machine though16Gb of RAM.   The leak seems to be related to long sleep ( I used to never turn it off)  and then Time Machine so again, similar.   Time Machine (to LaCie 2TB via USB) wanted to re-archive the whole hard drive and via Memory Clean I could watch the RAM get eaten up.   Interesting tidbit, Activity Monitor is oblivious to the leak... completely oblivious. 
Today, I begin the fun part of copying the 800Gb of data and reinstalling Yosemite.   (Sarcasm)  That should only set me back and hour or two.... sheesh.
Of course, I cannot make any edits - NONE - in the new notfication center.   I can only get local area weather, the stocks apple provides and the time in Cupertino, two time zones away.
BTW, should you read this, we're out in the cold on Continuity though every now and again, I can see my iMac on my 4Gen iPad.   Weird.

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