Macos – TimeMachine: how to identify which files are bloating the backups

backupmacostime-machine

I just started a TimeMachine backup after having only negligible changes to files on my HD (as far as I can tell). Yet the backup is shown to be of ~6GB (!!)

Is there some easy way for me to see which files make up those 6GB that TM is trying to back up?

Best Answer

You can use the GUI tool called TimeTracker (direct download link here):

TimeTracker is a quick-and-dirty application that displays the contents of your Time Machine backups, and shows what's changed since the previous backup

That should suffice to examine your backups.

On OS X 10.7, the tmutil command will probably let you do the same, albeit only through the command line. To compare your current OS X state and the latest backup, run:

tmutil compare

You can also compare two snapshots with each other, e.g. the latest two:

tmutil compare <path-to-snapshot> <path-to-snapshot>

… where the path to the snapshot is on your Time Machine volume, within the Backups.backupdb folder.

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Mac – cp -r -l in MacOS (recursive copy preserving hard links)

It is easy enough to install cp from MacPorts, however, if you don't want to, or want to create a portable script, then you have three options:

rsync

rsync --archive --link-dest=../yesterdays_backup backups/yesterdays_backup\
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cpio

mkdir backups/todays_backup
cd backups/yesterdays_backup
find . -print | cpio -p -al ../todays_backup

pax

mkdir backups/todays_backup
cd backups/yesterdays_backup
pax -rwl . ../todays_backup

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A simple way would be to just use find with the -links option.

Specifically you would want to do something like find path -type f -links 1.

I haven't tested, but I believe a command like this would delete all the multi-linked files.

# you might not need to escape the !, depends on your shell
# should find all the files that do NOT have a link count of 1 and delete them
find path -type f \! links 1 -print -delete

Best Answer

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