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I Recently bought a 2Tb external drive and configured time machine on my OS X 10.6.8 iMac. It started by making a full backup (approximately 1.6 Tb). Fine. I see a series of hourly incremental backups have run (a few hundred Mb each) A week goes by. All is good I have about 400Gb free on the backup disk. Suddenly it wants to make another 1.6 TB full backup. Disk full error. This implies that weekly (and I now assume, monthly) backups are not incremental. Is that correct?

Dave M
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Mr. Bill
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1 Answers1

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Time Machine backups are all incremental once the first full backup has been made. But the system isn't at all smart about dealing with name changes. If you rename a directory, Time Machine will treat the change as if the old directory was deleted and a new directory was created with all the same files in it. Since it considers the directory to be new, fresh copies of everything under it will be made.

Changing the owner or permissions of a file will also trigger the creation of a fresh backup copy even if the file contents were not changed. Changing directory permissions does not trigger fresh backups of everything underneath, however.

Kyle Jones
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