# XCode snapshots, disk usage and Time Machine



## Mikuro (Feb 23, 2009)

I'm having a little trouble with XCode's snapshots feature, and I'm wondering if it's normal or if something is going wrong for me.

Earlier today I noticed Time Machine backing up almost 200MB. I found this very strange, because I had not installed anything in the past hour. Turns out it was XCode's snapshot disk image, which is a single disk image that's about 200MB. So Time Machine needs to copy the whole damned thing every time I make a new snapshot.

That alone is annoying enough, but there's more: I couldn't believe my snapshots were really 200MB, since I've only recently started using the feature, and not with any big projects. So I opened the image and looked inside. There's only 8MB of data in it. 8MB of data occupying 200MB of disk space, plus another 200MB in my Time Machine backup for every single new snapshot I make. Not cool.

So, a couple questions:

1. Is your XCode snapshots repository as bloated as mine is?
2. Can I safely convert it to a sparesbundle? (I assume that would use space more efficiently, especially regarding Time Machine.)

And on a semi-related note, are there any more Time Machine-friendly source code managers out there? I also use SVN for some projects, but even that changes a single large database with every update, causing Time Machine to back up a lot of duplicate data.


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## dadidoe (Feb 23, 2009)

When I snapshot WriteIt 3(Project=200MB,Snapshot 350MB),it's about double the size of the actual project .There may be some invisible files but I am sure this is normal.

I don't use time machine,so I don't know about that.


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## Mikuro (Feb 25, 2009)

200MB is pretty big! Does that include the build directory (which isn't included in snapshots)?

I've only been using it with my smaller projects. I have local SVN repositories set up for the projects I spend the most time on. SVN repositories aren't too Time Machine-friendly either, but at least they don't use much disk space otherwise.

For now I'm going back to an old AppleScript I made that simply copies the project folder (minus the build directory). It doesn't do incremental backups, so it's not all that efficient, but for small projects I don't care so much. It's also nice having "live" backups so I can easily open an older version of the project and build it.

Maybe I'll try removing the snapshot repository and let XCode make a new one.


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