If you have a mac with a single internal drive (iMac) can you partition that drive to use it with time machine?
Or must time machine use a separate drive?
Or must time machine use a separate drive?
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Can Time Machine use your internal boot drive?
- Thread starter wakerider017
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If you were to use Time Machine on your boot drive, it'd consume more than half your disk space and the only thing it'd protect you against would be if you accidently deleted files yourself... If you think that's a good idea, then, well, you're probably exactly the kind of person who would accidently delete their important files all the time.
So you can use time machine if you only have a single internal drive?
Why would it consume more than half my drive?
Couldn't I set up a 50GB partition on my (320GB) drive and use it like that.
I don't so much want to back up the system... but back up word files, .jpgs, music and stuff...
Just so I can go back a month and pull something out.
I meant if Time Machine were used to backup your whole system, like it is designed to do, that would require designating a drive at least as large as you are backing up.
Time machine is indefinite backup even if you had a an 80 GB hardrive tech you could use terabytes with time machine.
But for the simple fact of saying just going back a couple of days or undoing something you just did a small partition would work great for that.
Time machine will realize how much space it has to work with and work corresponding to that size.
But for the simple fact of saying just going back a couple of days or undoing something you just did a small partition would work great for that.
Time machine will realize how much space it has to work with and work corresponding to that size.
Forget about whether TM can be used on the boot drive. WHY would you want to. That totally defeats the purpose of a backup. If your boot drive goes down, and TM is on the boot drive, all of the sudden you have no back up. Ext. drives are not expensive, and having a reliable back up is invaluable.
While I fully agree with what you're saying, it could still be useful for recovering lost files caused by "bad luck", such as files deleted by mistake, overwritten documents or ones corrupted by bugs in applications.
It won't protect against hard errors, but at least against most soft errors.
I would for example find that useful on a laptop when I'm on the road. If the main drive goes down, I won't have the resources to fix the laptop anyway, but if I just delete a file, it could be recovered. A bus-powered 2.5" drive may be small, but it still isn't convenient to bring along.
Exactly! I have only ever had a hard drive fail on me once in my entire home computer experience. And that was about 5 years ago.
However I weekly mess up files, lose them, or accidently delete them...
I am not trying to back up my entire system to do a restore, but I am just trying to back up critical files and folders.
yeah...
Agreed. I don't see why anyone would want to use a partition on their primary drive for backup purposes.
Completely defeats the point.
Agreed. I don't see why anyone would want to use a partition on their primary drive for backup purposes.
Completely defeats the point.
Yes, but I agree that it defeats the purpose of backing up. You can get a 500GB external for less than $150. Imagine how pissed you'd be when your internal hd crashes and you've lost EVERYTHING. Like Steve said, "We're all ticking time bombs"...