[mikekij]

I wasn't aware that any non-OS service even had access to data and applications saved in Time Machine. This might be worthy of a bug bounty report to Apple.

[saagarjha]

  $ ls /Volumes/YourTimeMachineBackup/Backups.backupdb/YourComputerName

[chrisseaton]

But Time Machine is just a file system volume, mounted like any other? It has some unusual hard links in it, but it's just a regular file system mount.

[aasasd]

There's at least one app for figuring out why every hourly backup takes half a gigabyte. It might require root privileges, but I doubt that.

[saagarjha]

Wait, is that not normal?

[Yetanfou]

Hourly backups with rsnapshot - which serves more or less the same task but does it without a fancy UI - take no more than the size of the changed files plus some space for file system metadata. If Time Machine takes half a GB on a quiescent file system I'd say something is amiss...

[yjftsjthsd-h]

... unless you are writing a half-gig every hour, why would that be remotely expected?

[saagarjha]

I would think that it's touching a bunch of log files slightly or something…

[aasasd]

My guess so far is something like Firefox's history database.

[Yetanfou]

If that is half a GB Firefox would be crawling. Here is is around 60MB on a well-used machine with an ancient FF profile.