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How should Time Machine be setup?
Note: of the 830 8mb band files included in each backup, only a relatively small number show a recent modified date (i.e., same day as the backup) - many haven't been modified in several days. But, all 830 files are included in each of the backups, requiring lots of disk space.
How should Time Machine be setup?
The way TM works is it creates hard links to any files that haven't changed since they were last backed up. If you're not familiar with hard links, they are basically file entries pointing to data on your hard drive. Technically I think every file on your drive is a hard link and once another hard link to a preexisting file has been created, they are identical and there is no way to tell them apart. So if, for example, you have an 8MB file on your drive and you create another hard link to that file, the new file will both A. look exactly like the original, B. contain the exact same data (if the data changes then both files will be changed), C. report a size of 8MB, but the data will only be on your drive once so no matter how many hard links there are to it, the total amount of disk space used by all of them combined will be 8MB. I don't know if this is a good explanation (if you need more info you can look it up - Wikipedia comes to mind) but basically the files you are seeing that do not have a 'recent modified date' were not acually backed up - they are just hard links that were created for the previously backed up files and they will always report the same size as their counterparts but are not actually taking up extra disk space because they are pointing to the same data.
How should Time Machine be setup?
Thanks, everkleer80, I think I do understand. Based on further analysis, it appears like Time Machine (TM) isn't backing up as much as I originally thought, but I'm still not sure it's behaving as I would hope. I used Grand Perspective (great tool!) to analyze the TM sparsebundle backup file on the Time Capsule, which allowed me to filter out hard linked files. It showed that TM was not actually backing up the full 6gb Identities folders every time, but it was backing up about 500mb every time. The Database file is actually about 1.5gb and the 500mb corresponds exactly to the size of my Exchange server mailbox size, which would be one of the mailboxes included with the Database file.
How should Time Machine be setup?
I've actually never used Entourage or anything so I'm not really sure what's going on here. You're right it sounds like every band in the sparsebundle associated with the mailbox is changing. If I had to guess, I'd say that maybe it's moving data around in the file to limit fragmentation (similar to defragmenting a hard drive.) That sounds pretty unlikely, but it would result in data moving to different bands in the sparsebundle and therefore all the associated bands would end up changed... Anyway, GrandPerspective is a great program! I also found it when troubleshooting a different TM issue (my issue was space not being free'd up in my TM disk image when I deleted files from the backup - turned out the 'deleted' data was going into a hidden temp file on the disk.) I should have mentioned before, though, that TimeTracker is a cool little program that will show you how much data and which files were backed up in each backup. There are some better similar programs out there but I don't think the others are quite as free as TimeTracker.
How should Time Machine be setup?
Just a clarification, (I thought we were supposed to be able to edit our posts now?) when I said: If I had to guess, I'd say that maybe it's moving data around in the file to limit fragmentation (similar to defragmenting a hard drive.)I meant maybe Entourage is moving data around in the mailbox file which would result in all associated bands being changed. For example, if I have a simple text file ("abcdefghijklmnop") split into bands or 5 characters each (band1="abcde", band2="fghij", etc) and I insert the letter A at the beginning of the file, then every band would be change (now band1="Aabcd", band2="efghi", etc.) Whereas if I just added the letter to the end of the file then only the last band would be changed.
How should Time Machine be setup?
I've done additional analysis, with both TimeTracker and Finder/Path Finder. It does appear that Time Machine is just backing up the bands that have been modified since the last TM backup - as expected. The surprise for me is how much space the bands are taking up - again, I'm seeing about 400-500mb per daily backup. I suspect the issue is the 8mb band size. For example, for the few backups I examined, the number of bands was 50-70 - multiply by 8mb per band and I get my number. And 50-70 modified bands may correspond to about the number of emails I receive/send in a day (though it seems a bit high).
How should Time Machine be setup?
I think you're right on with changing the band size. But it sounds like the messages may be spread throughout the file rather than being grouped together (not sure about this) which means that multiple messages may or may not go into one band depending on how close together they are in the mailbox file. So if you increase the band size to, say, 16 MB, and have 10 new messages that are all < 1MB and are grouped together, then they may all go into the same band and you will only have to backup 16MB, but then again if the messages are spread apart in the file and each one goes into a different band, then you will be backing up 160MB. So I think smaller is definately the way to go here so no matter where in the data your messages are, you will be backing up closer to the amount of data that actually changed (maybe make the bands 1 or 2MB if you can?)
How should Time Machine be setup?
OK, now I'm using a sparsebundle file with 1MB bands instead of the default 8MB. It's soon after the change and I'm still monitoring, but the conversion appears to have the desired result - my backup is now in the 100MB range instead of 500MB range. Maybe 500KB bands would reduce the backup size further, I don't know.
I used this command to convert the sparsebundle file:
where Office_2008_IdentitiesNEW.sparsebundle is the converted file with the 1MB bands. After the conversion, I created a new alias pointing to the converted file.Edited on Nov 16, '09 01:55:08PM by cmcd
How should Time Machine be setup?
According to the man page for hdiutil, 1MB bands are the smallest allowed. |
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