Why is sparsebundle so big

I made sure the external disk is not excluded from timemachine backup in tm preferences. Backup seemed to take forever it actually said "preparing for backup" the whole time with a spinning progress bar ie 24 hours and still the same pogress bar. When i open up time machine, an earlier version of my imac is there, but the external drive is kind of greyed and i cannot access it.

When I check the sparse bundle size, it is under gb, when my imac is around gb, with the external drive. Why is the sparse bundle so small relative to the imac? Posted on Mar 17, PM. Yeah, that can't be right. The missing sounds more like it, espcially if the iPhoto library on the internal HD was backed-up before it was deleted. Try dragging the iMac's sparse bundle into Disk Utility's sidebar; see how large that says it is towards the bottom. That will take quite a while, of course, so do it when you have some time.

Posted on Mar 18, PM. Mar 18, PM in response to marten berkman In response to marten berkman. The drive hasn't been fully backed-up yet, so you can't access any backups of it.

You cannot see a partial backup. Are you backing-up wirelessly? If so, GB in 20 hours is not too bad a speed. Connect via Ethernet, and it should go at least times faster. Once the first backup is complete, others can be done wirelessly. Sounds like that will save about GB from being backed-up twice! Mar 18, PM. Page content loaded. I am wondering whether the "processing" progress bar was due to the time capsule freeing up space for the additional data on the new external drive. When I cancelled it, available space on the tc incresed from to gb.

No, i am not wireless, but hardwired to the tc, hence my curiousity at the long initial "preparation" for backing up.

I have a feeling it just got hung on something, and when cancelled and resumed, was fine. The backup complete, i checked the contents of the backed up version of the external drive, and the iphoto folder was the same size as original, so I have confidence that iphoto is backed up.

Now I could delete the iphoto from the imac, freeing up tons of space. Still curious why the imac sparsebundle is only gb, while my macbook pro sparsebundle is about gb Also, the 2tb time capsule has gb of 1.

Managing Your Image — By way of review, a disk image is a special file that can also behave like a disk — that is, if you double-click the image, a new volume appears in the Finder; this volume can contain any number of files and folders, and you can open or copy them just as you would do with the contents of any other volume.

Disk images typically have the extension. If you want to distribute a whole set of files and be sure that they remain perfectly intact on the other end, using a disk image is an excellent way to do so. Over the years, Apple has created a variety of different formats for disk images. The sparse image extension. In both cases, the images could begin relatively small, rather than occupying lots of unused space on your disk even when they contained little data.

But sparse images, like. Making any change to their contents marked the entire image file as changed. If you were doing incremental backups that included a large disk image file, say, this meant that even the tiniest change would result in the entire file having to be backed up again.

For example, I used to store private documents on a 10 GB encrypted. You just need to set it up once and then forget it ever existed. Time Machine runs in the background, creating copies of the files you want to back up, every hour of every day. Time Machine usually works quietly behind the scenes, and the only way you can tell when it is running is when you notice your Mac being slow. This error happens when Time Machine assumes that the backup process is still running, even though it has already stopped for some reason.

The error seems to occur randomly, but several users have noted that the problem occurs when the device is left overnight and switches to sleep mode to save energy. The error can also happen when the computer restarts after freezing. Pro Tip: Scan your Mac for performance issues, junk files, harmful apps, and security threats that can cause system issues or slow performance.

It is difficult to determine what the exact root of the problem is, so the only way to fix this is to try every method available to see which one resolves the error. Before you proceed with the solutions discussed below, you should start with some first-aid fixes in case the error is temporary.