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Having recently failed to get Time Machine working on my MacBook intel 2.4GHz 4GB RAM running 10.6.8 (see 'Time machine failing' in topic list), I have decided to go back to my old Apple Backup software.
I have been keeping these since October 2010. I ran a backup on it yesterday which reported, 'backed up successfully'. However I have just taken a look at the restore function and it tells me that there are only two backups available one from Oct 2010 and one from June of this year.
The history shows 15 successful backups including yesterday and they all appear to on the external disk in the folder. I have had a look at the size of the files in the Apple backup folder, the original full-backup is 90GB then most of the incrementals are about 2/3GB each, however there are two that are over 90GB, yesterdays is 11GB.
I have no idea what is happening. I have run disk utility on the external HD and it says that it's fine. I also use this disk to store a TIme Machine backup from another MacBook and this always works fine (last done today). It is a 1TB drive with 500GB free space.
As always any suggestions gratefully received.

It's possible that if you move or rename folders in parent trees where lots of data is at, like moving your itunes music library for example, it can cause a large amount of data to be re-copied on the following backup.

If this doesn't happen ever, then the initial backup will be about the size of your used hdd space, and the following backups will all be very small, somewhere between 200mb and 3gb each or so, depending on computer use and time between backups, since it only backs up information that has changed since the last backup

Thanks that makes sense. I'm going to dump everything and start again.