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What's the point of Time Machine if it takes a huge bloated space on my HDD anyway?

Suno

Suno

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 12, 2011
252
1
Aside from a few important documents I need to keep on hand, my harddrive is virtually free from most things. I have a separate HDD for movies, large apps, and other things.

Yet, when I go to About This Mac -> Storage, a huge chunk of my free space is taken by Backups. I'm positive this is from the times I back up with Time Machine. I'm positive it wasn't there before I started using it.

If I'm right, then it makes me wonder what's the point of Time Machine? Am I not better off just manually backing up everything? I realize there are advantages to using Time Machine vs. manual back up, but I just don't think this wasted bloated space on my HDD is worth it.
 
Macman45

Macman45

macrumors G5
Jul 29, 2011
13,197
135
Somewhere Back In The Long Ago
Suno said:
Aside from a few important documents I need to keep on hand, my harddrive is virtually free from most things. I have a separate HDD for movies, large apps, and other things.

Yet, when I go to About This Mac -> Storage, a huge chunk of my free space is taken by Backups. I'm positive this is from the times I back up with Time Machine. I'm positive it wasn't there before I started using it.

If I'm right, then it makes me wonder what's the point of Time Machine? Am I not better off just manually backing up everything? I realize there are advantages to using Time Machine vs. manual back up, but I just don't think this wasted bloated space on my HDD is worth it.
Click to expand...

TM just keeps a local snapshot. It's likely that your Itunes library is taking up space. You can exclude large items from backups by going into TM preferences and adding them to the list.

It's not an issue on my Imac. but on my rMBP large items are excluded as they are backed up elsewhere on my TV and my Pegasus R4...
 
dusk007

dusk007

macrumors 68040
Dec 5, 2009
3,411
104
I generally always exclude movies and music. That stuff I prefer to backup manually. If some newer purchase or download is lost it is just a download and one can redownload.

Timemachine local snapshots are more of a "oh I shouldn't have deleted that" feature. The real purpose of a backup is to be there in case of hdd failure so it ought to necessarily be on a different drive.
 
Orlandoech

Orlandoech

macrumors 68040
Jun 2, 2011
3,341
887
I exclude my whole internal SSD lol. I only include my external HDD, so when I plug in my external HDD it wirelessly backups to another external connected to my Airport Extreme.
 
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