Mac – Backups not available in Time Machine, but visible in disk’s backupdb folder

To adjust the schedule in order to backup at a time more to your choosing than simply every hour, you can use the Time Machine Editor tool, which is available as a free download from:

http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/

TimeMachineEditor is a software for Mac OS X Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion that lets you change the default one-hour backup interval of Time Machine. You can change the interval or create a more sophisticated scheduling (see screenshot below). This is useful if you don’t need to backup every hour and don’t want the performance penalty. This is also especially useful if you manipulate lots of data within one hour as you would spend the whole day backing up.

Changing your interval should not affect the daily or monthly backups, which are not actually any different to the hourly ones in any material way.

To get a better idea of what is causing large or lengthy backups, you can use the Backup Loupe software, available for free download at:

http://soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe/

"With BackupLoupe you are able to answer questions like Why is Time Machine so slow? Why is my Time Machine drive already full? Which files are actually being backed up? Has a particular file/folder been backed up at all? How many revisions of a file/folder exist in Time Machine? A file/folder was deleted accidentally. When did this happen and where is the latest backup? Is my backup drive big enough? Should I consider buying a larger one? And if yes, when?"

You could try using BackupLoupe to inspect exactly what has been copied in each backup. I find I have to exclude things like my web browser cache to keep the size of the backups down.