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What DOES Time Machine back-up?
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Moderator  Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: This is not my beautiful house
Status:
Offline
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I'm using Time Machine to back-up my daughter's Leopard MacBook before we run the Snow Leopard upgrade on it. This is my first time using Time Machine and it's confusing me a bit.
My daughter has filled about 112GB of the 150GB HD in the MacBook. However, TIme Machine is telling me it's backing-up only about 39GB. That seems very small. As I said, this is the first time Time Machine has been used with this MacBook, so I naturally assumed it would back-up the entire 112GB.
So, what IS TIme Machine backing-up? Additionally, the MacBook has two user accounts (Admin and my daughter's main user acct.) Is Time Machine backing-up both of them? I expected, at the very least, some control as to what files or accounts to include. I'm finding the preferences and on-board help/instructions for TM maddeningly useless.
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: planning a comeback !
Status:
Offline
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TM should back up everything needed to completely restore the OS and all user data.
However, scratch and temp files and logs are not backed up. Also, I think the Trash is omitted, but I'm not sure.
I somehow doubt that your daughter has accumulated 73GB in scratch files though.
So the other possibility is that TM just erred on its 39GB estimate and in reality will back up much more than that.
Why don't you do the complete TM backup cycle and see how much it backed up in the end.
-t
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Moderator Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: This is not my beautiful house
Status:
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Thanks. I'll let it process and see what it does.
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Moderator Join Date: Dec 2000
Location: Polwaristan
Status:
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WhatSize or GrandPerspective are useful for sorting out huge files/space issues like that.
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Moderator Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: This is not my beautiful house
Status:
Offline
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Backup is completed. As promised, the backup is about 39GB. I'm used to doing backups on my old G5 using SuperDuper, so I'm used to the size of a backup to match the volume.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: New York, NY
Status:
Offline
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Did you look in the TM settings to see if anything had been previously excluded? If nothing is excluded, than use one of the above utilities to see what's going on.
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Vandelay Industries
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Administrator  Join Date: May 2000
Location: California
Status:
Offline
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In TM preferences, click (Options) - this is an exclude list. If there's nothing interesting there (like the /System folder being excluded) then you have some huge temp files / folders accumulated somewhere.
I personally like OmniDiskSweeper for finding useless big files/folders. It is free.
You might also be interested in DupScan. It finds duplicate files, even if they have different file names.
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: FFM
Status:
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