4 ms·

I wasn't aware that any non-OS service even had access to data and applications saved in Time Machine. This might be worthy of a bug bounty report to Apple.

• saagarjha 7y ago
  $ ls /Volumes/YourTimeMachineBackup/Backups.backupdb/YourComputerName
• aasasd 7y ago
  There's at least one app for figuring out why every hourly backup takes half a gigabyte. It might require root privileges, but I doubt that.
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    Wait, is that not normal?
    • yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      ... unless you are writing a half-gig every hour, why would that be remotely expected?
      • saagarjha 7y ago
        I would think that it's touching a bunch of log files slightly or something…
        • aasasd 7y ago
          My guess so far is something like Firefox's history database.
          • Yetanfou 7y ago
            If that is half a GB Firefox would be crawling. Here is is around 60MB on a well-used machine with an ancient FF profile.
    • Yetanfou 7y ago
      Hourly backups with rsnapshot - which serves more or less the same task but does it without a fancy UI - take no more than the size of the changed files plus some space for file system metadata. If Time Machine takes half a GB on a quiescent file system I'd say something is amiss...
• chrisseaton 7y ago
  But Time Machine is just a file system volume, mounted like any other? It has some unusual hard links in it, but it's just a regular file system mount.