Why are Back In Time snapshots so large?

Posted by Chethan S. on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Chethan S.
Published on 2011-02-19T14:43:28Z Indexed on 2011/02/19 15:33 UTC
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backup

I just backed up the contents of my home partition onto my external hard drive using Back In Time. I browsed to the backed up contents in the external drive and under properties it showed me the size as 9.6 GB.

As I read that in next snapshots I create, Back In Time does not backup everything but creates hard links for older contents and saves newer contents, I wanted to test it. So I copied two small files into my home partition and ran 'Take Snapshot' again.

The operation completed within a minute - first it checked previous snapshot, assessed the changes, detected two new files and synced them. After this when I browsed to the backed up contents, I was surprised to see the newer and older backup taking up 9.6 GB each.

Isn't this a waste of hard drive space? Or did I interpret something wrongly?

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