Mac – Permanently prune backups created by Time Machine

Much of what happens in Time Machine is undisclosed, but we know how the algorithm works so making an educated guess is possible:

Time Machine stores full versions of changed files on every backup. Not incremental differences. At the outset of a backup it does a search of your filesystem for files that have been modified since the last backup date. This cuts down what it has to look at. Then, for every file on this list, it compares it against the version that was last backed up. If it hasn't actually changed it just stores a pointer to the old version with some new metadata for the inode changes.

You've probably got timestamps changing on lots of files, but not the actual contents. So at the outset of a backup, Time Machine is adding up the size of the all files with changed timestamps and getting 15GB, but once it does the file diffs it turns out to be far less data that's actually changed. Time Machine, in the interests of being expedient about things, is likely making the cleanup space decision upfront and based on the worst-case estimate.

It can help to exclude some often-changing data from Time Machine backups. Things like the browser cache and IMAP mail offline archive (for example the local cache of your Gmail account). You can use the excellent and free TimeTracker tool from CharlesSoft to view the contents of your backups on a Time Machine volume. This might be able to give you an idea of what has changed from backup to backup so you can build a good exclusions list. For my recommendations on excluding things from Time Machine backups see this Ask Different answer.

You can add files and folders to the exclusion list - this only prevents future backups from copying those files. You can script these exclusion lists with terminal in Lion using tmuil.

You can delete all versions of files and folders using the Time Machine interface. This is a somewhat manual practice.

Apple doesn't support (there's no built in setting) to set an arbitrary time limit for backups. Once the drive fills, TimeMachine will delete enough backups to start the current backup and then warn you that files have been deleted. It will do the deletion silently if you don't ask to be warned in the preference pane. You have to monitor the drive if you can't afford Time Machine automatically deleting files when it needs more room.