I’ve been noticing on my Mac OS X Mavericks 10.8 Server I have running in a data center has been filling up its Time Machine volume way too quickly. The backups are continually huge and only about a week fits on the second hard drive inside of the Mac mini. Every time the machine backed up it was taking up so much room that previous backups had to be deleted.
I searched everywhere and couldn’t find an issue. I looked in console logs for Time Machine and couldn’t find anything definitive as well but it looked like it was something in /Library/Server. I realized that it must be a file or set of files that are always being written to so they’re always backed up every hour or so.
I had tried some command-line tools like “du” but the usage was so many levels deep it was hard to pinpoint. Finally I grew a brain and installed DaisyDisk on the server to see what I could find. Within minutes I found the pinch point. See all of the repeated pattern in the third layer from the center?
Turns out the file /Library/Server/Xcode/Logs/xcs_proxy.log was huge and never rolled over by the logging utility. I had been using Xcode on this server to run Bots but had since turned it off. I still need to figure out WHY this file is being written to without the Bots service running. Because the file is always being written to, the entire thing is backed up every single hour.
Solution:
sudo rm /Library/Server/Xcode/Logs/*
If I find the solution to the xcs_proxy issue, I’ll follow up.