Arent hourly backups a bit excessive?

It really depends on what you're doing on a daily basis. If you like browsing and iTunes, yes, it's probably excessive.

If you are a professional photographer/editor, 5 minutes of work could mean thousands of dollars. So it could be very necessary.

Time Machine backups are differential, so it really isn't backing up the same stuff over and over. All it backs up each hour is what has changed since the last backup. If you're not changing anything, there's no downside and no wasted space. If you are changing things -- well, then you'll want to back it up.

Time Machine is going to use up every last byte of space available on the volume you chose. You need to just accept that that space is going to be used up, no matter what, and let Time Machine just do its thing.

VoodooDaddy said:

Well thats what I thought, but how can this be explained? Before I went to bed I happened to check free space on the new hdd I bought. It had 440.50gb free. I remember that specifically because it was exactly 25gb used on the drive. Its a 500gb drive but usable space was only 465.50gb.

So I check the drive this morning and see it has 439.56 free, so it had effectively used another 1gb for nothing.

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It probably hadn't yet created "daily" backups, so it had to populate them for the first time (with just links).

VoodooDaddy said:

Well thats what I thought, but how can this be explained? Before I went to bed I happened to check free space on the new hdd I bought. It had 440.50gb free. I remember that specifically because it was exactly 25gb used on the drive. Its a 500gb drive but usable space was only 465.50gb.

So I check the drive this morning and see it has 439.56 free, so it had effectively used another 1gb for nothing.

Click to expand...

That's hardly 1gb, that's 440 mb.

It backs up hourly for the first day and then daily and then weekly.

I only have it set to backup my documents, mail and contacts. I partitioned my external portable drive to have 30GB for Time Machine. I should really use my external at home once daily backup of Time Machine start, but I'm not sure if I can have more than one external to be used as a Backup.

Veritas&Equitas said:

It really depends on what you're doing on a daily basis. If you like browsing and iTunes, yes, it's probably excessive.

If you are a professional photographer/editor, 5 minutes of work could mean thousands of dollars. So it could be very necessary.

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yup, even though this is true and i completely agree with it.. i think it should have an option of how often to back up...

This is why there's a really BIG on/off switch in the TM preferences panel.

kman79 said:

It backs up hourly for the first day and then daily and then weekly.

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Actually that's not entirely true -- it always backs up hourly. It just doesn't retain all of the hourly backups once they're a day old.

juanster said:

yup, even though this is true and i completely agree with it.. i think it should have an option of how often to back up...

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It doesn't make any sense, though. Time Machine won't use any less space if you were able to force it to back up only once a day. You wouldn't actually be saving any space on the backup volume with your approach.

Time machine only retains the hourly backups for the previous 23 hours. Anything older than that is being pruned to daily and weekly backups only (under the theory that hourly backups are less meaningful the older they are).

kman79 said:

It backs up hourly for the first day and then daily and then weekly.

I only have it set to backup my documents, mail and contacts. I partitioned my external portable drive to have 30GB for Time Machine. I should really use my external at home once daily backup of Time Machine start, but I'm not sure if I can have more than one external to be used as a Backup.

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what? how did u get it to do that? i ve been looking all over the place (obviously not everywhere since you found it), to get to an option panel or somehting to ask TM to only back up certain things, whne i click on preferences TM the only option button there is takes me to chnage back up disk...

juanster said:

what? how did u get it to do that? i ve been looking all over the place (obviously not everywhere since you found it), to get to an option panel or somehting to ask TM to only back up certain things, whne i click on preferences TM the only option button there is takes me to chnage back up disk...

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From the Apple Help menu...

I don't think so, but I've got tons of free space. 1tb in the Powermac and 500gb for extra space and 500gb for TM. But when I code I'm anal and make backups as I go..., so TM doesn't help there. For the other things i do, photos, documents, its nice.

Nugget said:

It doesn't make any sense, though. Time Machine won't use any less space if you were able to force it to back up only once a day. You wouldn't actually be saving any space on the backup volume with your approach.

Time machine only retains the hourly backups for the previous 23 hours. Anything older than that is being pruned to daily and weekly backups only (under the theory that hourly backups are less meaningful the older they are).

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ohhhhhhhhh niceeee, ok then nevermind it can back up every 5 minutes if it wants to i dont care.

VoodooDaddy said:

Well thats what I thought, but how can this be explained? Before I went to bed I happened to check free space on the new hdd I bought. It had 440.50gb free. I remember that specifically because it was exactly 25gb used on the drive. Its a 500gb drive but usable space was only 465.50gb.

So I check the drive this morning and see it has 439.56 free, so it had effectively used another 1gb for nothing.

Click to expand...

The amount of space it's using will fluctuate as it creates hourly backups then replaces them with daily backups, then replaces daily backups with weekly backups.

To give it a fair shot and to get a realistic idea of how much space it's really using, let it do it's thing for couple weeks, then see how much space is actually being used up, then change the settings appropriately.

I could easily see it using a gig or two of wiggle room every day for the incremental backups, but I bet you'll have your gig back at the end of the day if you just let it work and don't create any significant files.

juanster said:

what? how did u get it to do that? i ve been looking all over the place (obviously not everywhere since you found it), to get to an option panel or somehting to ask TM to only back up certain things, whne i click on preferences TM the only option button there is takes me to chnage back up disk...

Click to expand...

Post #14 on this thread tells it all. I have not yet tried using the backup or restoring from a back up though

Does Time Machine allow you to choose which content of a backup u choose to restore?

EDIT: Never mind, I figured it out, thanks

kman79 said:

Post #14 on this thread tells it all. I have not yet tried using the backup or restoring from a back up though

Does Time Machine allow you to choose which content of a backup u choose to restore?

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You just find the file or files you want to restore and click the "restore" button at the bottom right side of the screen ..

Microsoft wins

In my opinion, this is one of the few occasions when Microsoft has beaten Apple.

Windows XP had System Restore several years ago. It doesn't take three days to do the first back-up nor does it need an external hard-drive to work.

I think Time Machine is a real anti-climax and, dare I say, a bit crappy. I don't want my powerbook constantly plugged-in to a HDD for TM to work.

My Time Machine will probably remain switched off and I'll carry on backing-up my important files manually.

joefinan said:

In my opinion, this is one of the few occasions when Microsoft has beaten Apple.

Windows XP had System Restore several years ago. It doesn't take three days to do the first back-up nor does it need an external hard-drive to work.

I think Time Machine is a real anti-climax and, dare I say, a bit crappy. I don't want my powerbook constantly plugged-in to a HDD for TM to work.

My Time Machine will probably remain switched off and I'll carry on backing-up my important files manually.

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so what you are saying is... you want TM to back up your files to teh same HD your files are in... yeah that really sounds like the champ way to go... just hope for your HD never to fail then i guess? because if your HD goe sthen wouldn t all your "Back UP" be gone too?

I've just bought a 500Gb eSATA HD for this to run on.

But I have one question, whats the performance like when its running?

IE if im in Lightroom using all the IO/Mem/CPU bandwidth available will it slow Lightroom down or does it all in the background using the available resources?

You can back up manually. Turn off Time Machine. Make sure TM icon is in the Dock. Right Click the icon and select Back up now.

I started using TM today and did a first backup this evening. It was about 250 MB. Then again I have been doing a lot of work fiddling with Leopard so that may account for the size of the backup.

Also, if you are wondering about deleting something permanently, even from TM, go into TM select the item in the Finder or wherever it is in the space/time continuum and use the actions menu in the tool bar (it's the only button/menu that works in TM) with the item to delete selected. There is an option to delete the item. What's good about this is if you forget to exclude a folder or large file type, you can add it to the exclude list in TM and then go into TM and zap it there.

VoodooDaddy said:

Well thats what I thought, but how can this be explained? Before I went to bed I happened to check free space on the new hdd I bought. It had 440.50gb free. I remember that specifically because it was exactly 25gb used on the drive. Its a 500gb drive but usable space was only 465.50gb.

So I check the drive this morning and see it has 439.56 free, so it had effectively used another 1gb for nothing.

Click to expand...

Are you using a Virtual Machine from Parallels or VMWare? If so, make sure they're excluded from your backup. The slightest changed in the VM (basically loading it), will cause Time Machine to rebackup the entire VM.

Another thing which has potential to fill up your drive is Bittorrent downloads. If you're in the process of downloading a file, TM will rebackup the partially downloaded file every hour until it's done downloading. It's probably a good idea to exclude your temporary download folder.

joefinan said:

In my opinion, this is one of the few occasions when Microsoft has beaten Apple.

Windows XP had System Restore several years ago. It doesn't take three days to do the first back-up nor does it need an external hard-drive to work.

I think Time Machine is a real anti-climax and, dare I say, a bit crappy. I don't want my powerbook constantly plugged-in to a HDD for TM to work.

My Time Machine will probably remain switched off and I'll carry on backing-up my important files manually.

Click to expand...

You are kidding right?

First System Restore doesn't let you easily select a file and restore it. As another poster said, it stores it's Restore Points on your system drive. Can you even restore a single file with System Restore? I have never in my life successfully used System Restore for anything useful.

As for having to keep your HDD plugged in, you don't. Time Machine will still keep track of all the changes, then when you choose to plug in the HDD again, it'll back them all up.

The safest backup plan for any system is backups to another disk that is not your main system disk. It's even preferable to have backups go to an external drive, not just another internal drive.

-Kevin

You can change the interval if you want apparently. Haven't tried it myself

If you think Time Machine backs up too often (or not often enough) for your liking, navigate into /System » Library » LaunchDaemons. There you'll find a file named com.apple.backupd-auto.plist. Open it in your favorite text editor, and look for this section:
<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>3600</integer>
Change the 3600 number to some other time interval in seconds, and you'll have changed Time Machine's backup interval.

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