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How much external hard drive space do you need for Time Machine?

T

techguy40

macrumors regular
Original poster
How much external hard drive space do you need for Time Machine?


I have the new macbook pro 2.4GHz with 200GB hard drive.
 
techguy40 said:
How much external hard drive space do you need for Time Machine?


I have the new macbook pro 2.4GHz with 200GB hard drive.
Click to expand...

at least the big enough to fit all the files you want to back up... with your Set up I would get an Airport Base Station Extreme and hook up a 500GB hard disk. Or buy a Time Capsule, as it really is a pain to have to plug in the external drive to your macbook every time you need to back up.
 
mr.stinki said:
Doesn't really matter all that much. Obviously, more would be better.
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it does for me, [on multiple computers] mine won't "auto-delete" like it says it will.... It just tells me "not enough free space on harddrive.

So, to back up my 30Gb of used space on my MBP, and 100 on my external media drive, I need a 400GB partition to backup for a reasonable amount of time. 🙁
 
tuffluffjimmy said:
at least the big enough to fit all the files you want to back up... with your Set up I would get an Airport Base Station Extreme and hook up a 500GB hard disk. Or buy a Time Capsule, as it really is a pain to have to plug in the external drive to your macbook every time you need to back up.
Click to expand...

Meh, it's not THAT painfull..
 
Time Capsule will save 'deeper' into time with space available. HFS+ formatting would probably allow a 200GB drive to backup a few months to 75GB. My MBP utilizes 100GB and the 6 months of Time Machine occupies 150GB.

Personally, I only need two weeks of backup...
 
however big your hard drive is in your computer, you want to double it. Most 500 GB external hard drive are close to the $100 dollor mark, which is really good.
 
I think I read somewhere that at least 1.5 X your hdd size is the minimum recommend to get a good backup. This obviously depends on how much you want to backup though. If money isn't a huge obstacle, I'd say at least 500GB. The more the better with TM since it can backup more copies of the same file before it starts to delete the oldest copy.
 
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