Backup bloating up
 

Using SD to backup my 80GB internal disk to an 80GB partition on my 160 GB external FW 800 drive. This runs on a nightly schedule.

Initially, the mirror used to be smaller than the source disk. However, as of yesterday, the target disk is full, while the source disk is still only 90% full. I haven't booted from the target disk yet, because I don't want to risk working with a full disk. What could be the problem here? Are there any redundant files which are piling up?

Are you using Smart Update, Copy Newer or Copy Different? Did you get an error on the copy? (The Troubleshooting section of the User's Guide explains a lot about how this can happen, so take a look...)

I was using Smart Update. After your response, I read up the User Guide, then selected Erase, then Copy. The copy failed, and I encountered severe directory corruption not just on the destination volume but also on the other partition on the same physical drive.

Repaired the destination volume with Disk Warrior, but lost most of the data. Am now running a Smart Update backup over the rebuilt directory.

And no, I did not get an error earlier, because I had noticed that the disk was full and aborted the scheduled backup.

Any ideas on what could be going wrong?

You're experiencing some sort of serious hardware trouble, walchan99: we can't affect other partitions, corrupt directories or anything like that -- we just don't operate at that level.

(This assumes you're not using any low-level software like AntiVirus that can interfere with any copying to the drive.)

Thanks, dnanian. It does seem like there's a hardware problem somewhere, though both my disks are checking out okay.

To go back to the original problem, where is the bloat coming from? What files are involved?

There's no way for me to know: if the drive's misbehaving, it could be related.