Twice today Time Machine has decided that it needs to completely backup everything on my boot drive that I have not specifically excluded. This is just under 60 GB of data, twice. I was shocked when I saw how much less space I had on the Time Machine drive, which prompted my inquiry. TimeTracker gave me a nice view of the changes, and what’s going on. I’m going to hold off disabling Time Machine until I see what things look like tomorrow morning.

I may have to get a second drive dedicated for Time Machine, but I’m going to be a little sad if I lose revisions of files because it decided to back my whole system up too often. All this will do is push me further into the ZFS camp. I’m still a little sad that Apple didn’t base Time Machine on ZFS – it would have been a much more elegant system for doing backups than what we have now. Of course, I’m even sadder that Apple dropped ZFS from Snow Leopard. Maybe one day…

UPDATE: everything has sorted itself out. The huge backups are slowly expiring, as they aren’t the last of the day, and the space is coming back. It’s still somewhat worrisome that it happened at all. I think the writing is on the wall – I need a dedicated Time Machine drive.