Sunday
Aug312008
Time Capsule Full!
Sunday, August 31, 2008 at 4:43PM 
Noticed a few days ago that my 1TB Time CApsule was almost full. I've been running for about 6 months and use it to back up all the Macs in the house so I suppose I wasn't surprised but thought I'd best check it out.You're probably aware that you can exclude drives and folders from Time Machine using the TM preferences, and I thought I had everything sorted just right. My main working area for screencast production is on a mirrored drive which is excluded from my Time Machine backup. Just as well as I can add 30GB of data to that drive every week.
At least I thought I had!
On investigation, it transpires that I'd created an alias to my working folder on that drive and added it to my "Places" section in Finder. So although the drive was excluded from TM backups, the working folder was not so TM has been diligently archiving 30GB of data each week across to teh Time Capsule - no wonder it was filling up.
I've just gone into Time Machine and started a deletion of all the copies of my working folder so that should clear quite a bit of space on the Time Capsule.
Might be worth checking for any aliases to external drives you might have set up!
Update: It looks like although I've deleted the extraneous files from Time Capsule, the amount of available space doesn't seem to have changed? I can only imagine that I've cleared space in the sparse bundle image file and that does not decrease in size.
Reader Comments (4)
Ow, I'll have to check that out. My TimeCapsule (1TB) has been full for a few weeks now, but I think I'm backing up all my Video material as well.
Regards,
Stefaan
Re TM backups, for network time machine backups, the data is stored in sparse disk images as you say, and they tend to expand as needed, but won't ever reduce in size, so if you made a 100MB disk image, put in a 99MB file, then replaced it with a 1KB file, it would still use 99-100MB of space. Bit of a pain, but then it won't keep expanding until you go beyond the last biggest limit.
I bought a TC when they came out and could not get it set up with my iMac and after the AppleCare telephone support could not resolve the issue, I returned it to the Apple Store and got my money back. I have no back up. Foolish maybe but I still have doubts about TM & TC.
Did you delete from your trash as well?