Got an email from
Carbon Copy Cloner about a problem on my wife's MBP today. After calming down just a bit
, I discovered that CCC could not find room for a Mail Log file. That file was showing as ~
80GB!! About a third of her total drive usage!!
I used the "Submit Error" & logs system in CCC and sent it off about 9:50 am. At 10:37 (47 minutes later!!!) I got a reply with the exact cause and the solution, even with some nice screen captures! There was also a link to the CCC Help file offering some Pref changes that will help avoid this problem in the future!
The problem is that, by default,
Mail sometimes allow certain log files to grow to massive sizes (80GB!). I never noticed this setup nor had any problems... yet. Next time you open Mail, check the title bar for any mailbox and see if there is some text besides the name of that mailbox. The text to look for is: "Connection Logging Enabled". The setting that controls this logging activity is not in Mail Prefs, however. It is found in the
Window->Connection Doctor menu item. I've included the screen shot CCC Support sent ("
mail_con_log_set.png") that shows how to stop this logging. I found it enabled on both my wife's MBP and my iMac. Disabled it in both machines.
I also changed CCC Advanced Prefs to allow the app to adjust the "Prune the SafetyNet" space to "Auto adjust" (second image: "
CCC-Auto_Adjust.jpg"). This will allow CCC to move massive files that may have been deleted from the source disk into a "_CCC SafetyNet" folder. You should then get a warning that you may need to determine whether those files are actually needed on the backup.
