Problem with many more gigs than should be are copied
 

I have a 'clone drive' connected to my iMac that SD! updates nightly. I have a portable drive that I keep at work, bring home and update monthly. The monthly updated drive updates less gigs after a month than my connected drive updates every day (WAY less.)

What the heck is going on? I looked last night and something like 300GB was being updated, when I'd guess less than 20GB was changed.

How can I try and trouble shoot?

My guess is that it's simply the state the files are in at the point where you bring it home. Downloads, files in the trash, etc, etc...

not hundreds of gigs per day changing, not possible.

Now I'm not saying that some process or something couldn't be possibly changing the status of files such that SD! thinks they have changed, but there is no way I touch that much data on this machine, it gets about 1 hour of use a day.

Well...at the same time, it is possible, because it's happening. Your system is constantly active, and making a small change in a big file means that entire big file is re-copied.

Your iTunes library, for example, has multiple parts to it - an XML file and a big database. One change to iTunes (even a play count) means (on my system) more than 400MB of data is different (not counting any content). The same goes for iPhoto and Aperture - smal changes (a photo) mean large data changes (library).

If you're using Parallels or VMWare, the entire virtual disk could have changed just from launching the app. Using Outlook/Entourage? The database is gigantic...

You can certainly look in the log to see what folder most of the time is being spent in, and review the file and folder count that's changing (along with the size). It might help.

But then how does the drive that only gets updated once a month only backup less than 50 gigs but the one that gets updated every night does over 300, that makes absolute no logic to me.

And I do have VirtualBox, I *think* I have it on the don't copy list, but regardless it's only about 13GB total anyway.

Mail, not Outlook.

Is there a log for copied files? I looked at the log while SD! was cloning but I only seemed to see it list things that were not copied.

I just erased my Clone drive and am doing a fresh SD! clone to it to see if that has any impact.

My guess is that if anything it's content in iTunes - but I'm not aware of say movie files actually being changed which would need to be happening to affect that magnitude of gigs being refreshed.

There is not a log for copied files. Again, I can only suggest that the states of the drives are different day-to-day vs. month-to-month. We're doing the same thing to both drives, and keep no history of the backups: we're live comparing the two drives.

Another reason for the difference, I could imagine, is that you have different exclusions for the two backup sets? Specifically, more exclusions for the monthly backup?