sparseimage gets bigger and bigger after every SmartUpdate

[mleinart]

So I've been backing up to the same sparseimage (located on a network drive) about once a month for the past few months. Over that time, the amount of space used by my drive has remained about the same - between 50 and 60G. When I first created the image, it was the same size as the drive. Now I noticed before backing up that it was about 90G (after last backup). After running another backup today, it's 94G. It appears that SmartUpdate is only adding and not erasing as it should.

Does anyone else see this? Running 2.6 (v85)

[sjk]

It's normal behavior. You have to compact sparse images to regain unused space. Here's an old Macworld article about it:

Ease sparse disk image compaction (http://www.macworld.com/article/58547/2007/06/compactsparse.html)

Same also applies to sparse image bundles added in Leopard.

[RobLewis]

Here's the short answer:

In Terminal, enter this command:

hdiutil compact "Name of your backup.sparseimage"

Then go do something else for a while.
As noted above, sparse images can grow by themselves, but they need help to shrink.

[dnanian]

Well, more like "path-to-your-backup-image" (you can drag the image file into Terminal and it'll type out the path for you).

[mleinart]

Ah ok, that makes a lot of sense. Would be real nice if I could do the compact in linux too but that doesn't look to be the case. I'll just have to make sure to compact it every few backups.

Thanks!