Analysing a Time Machine backup

BackupLoupe

> Is there any program around that will analyse a time machine backup
> and tell me where the storage has gone?
>

A nifty utility to analyze file sizes and overall disk usage is
GrandPerspective.

<http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/>

It works on any mounted disk, and you can also make it scan Time
Machine backups. This even works with a Time Capsule, although it is
extremely slow via wireless LAN (duh! ;) ).

Before you scan the Time Machine backup, though, you should probably
start by analyzing what's on your machine's hard drive. Maybe you can
find a few larger files that you don't need anymore. If that is the
case (and you are absolutely sure you can trash those files), delete
them from both your Mac as well as the Time Machine backup to reclaim
some HD real estate.

Here's a quick refresher on how to delete files from TM backups:

<http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2008/03/deleting-files-from-a-time-mac.html
 >


Regards,

Jochen.


--
Jochen Wolters | jochenpolytropia.com | http://polytropia.com

On 1/25/2010 2:04 PM, "Jeremy Roussak" wrote:
> Is there any program around that will analyse a time machine backup and tell
> me where the storage has gone? My backup disk is pretty much full, so that I
> only have backups stretching about 20 days into the past, yet by my
> calculations I'm not saving more than about half the backup disk.

I covered BackupLoupe a while back; it's handy for seeing what's dominating
your Time Machine backups.

<http://www.macworld.com/article/141624/2009/07/backuploupe.html>

On 26/01/2010, at 11:04 AM, Jeremy Roussak wrote:

> Is there any program around that will analyse a time machine backup and tell me where the storage has gone? My backup disk is pretty much full, so that I only have backups stretching about 20 days into the past, yet by my calculations I'm not saving more than about half the backup disk.

You could try jDiskReport:

<http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/>

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND. http://xri.net/=nigel.stanger

Thank you all. I'll investigate.

Jeremy

BackupLoupe was just the ticket.

In case anyone's interested, the "culprit" was TechTool Pro, which created enormous files (several gigabytes) every few hours in ~/Library/Application Support/TechTool Protection. Deleting all backups of that folder freed over 300GB. I suppose I might regret it in the future...

Jeremy

On 2/1/10 at 6:29 AM, jbrmac.com (Jeremy Roussak) wrote:

>In case anyone's interested, the "culprit" was TechTool Pro, which
>created enormous files (several gigabytes) every few hours in
>~/Library/Application Support/TechTool Protection. Deleting all
>backups of that folder freed over 300GB. I suppose I might regret it
>in the future...

Until I read your message, I had forgotten I also had this issue
with TechTool Pro and Time Machine.

In case you have not figured this out, there are a couple of
ways to get TechTool Pro and Time Machine to play nice with each other.

In the preference pane for Time Machine, you add the TechTool
Pro directory to the list of directories Time Machine will
ignore. You do this by clicking on the options button then the
"+" button and navigating to the TechTool control folder. Doing
this means Time Machine will not back up this folder which is
quite reasonable since TechTool Pro uses information in this
folder to recover files that have been erased but not yet
completely overwritten. Consequently, using an older version of
this file from a TimeMachine backup would not be useful. So, I
cannot see any case where deleting the backups of this folder in
TimeMachine would result in something you might regret in the future.

The other approach would be to go to the TechTool Pro preference
pane and disable the protection options. Doing this means you
will no longer be able to easily recover erased/deleted files.
But this really shouldn't be a problem if you have a good backup
of your work.

Note, if you do not either change the Time Machine options to
not backup this directory or TechTool Pro options to not write
files to this directory, sooner or later you will have the same
problem with your Time Machine backup drive.