MacOS – Time Machine Backing Up Large Amounts of Data Each Time

macostime-machine

I've got 2 time machine drives. I have one at home that gets used on the weekend and another that gets backed up to during the week. I recently replaced the one at my office. The only thing that is weird is that it's backing up 3-4GB of data each hour. It goes super quick, so it doesn't feel like its actually backing up that much data, though. I've ran disk utility on the disk and it doesn't find anything. Any thoughts? Is it just something weird or is there a problem with the drive?

Best Answer

On Lion you can use tmutil to compare Time Machine backups:

sudo tmutil compare                      # compare computer to latest backup
sudo tmutil listbackups                  # list available backups
sudo tmutil compare <backup1> <backup2>  # compare two backups from backup list

This should give you a good idea about where the volume is coming from.

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