Nevermind guys found the answer!! - Required space for time machine

[peapody]

I have been searching for an answer for this question, and I am sure it has been answered before, so I am sorry guys that I am asking this again.

I have a 500gb lacie d2 quadra that I plan to partition 4 times (1 for time machine, 1 for carbon copy cloner, 1 for my music and and 1 for my movies - the last two partitions in the FAT32). I need to delegate 120gb for my ccc but I am not sure how much I should give time machine as I want to give more harddrive space to my media partitions.

I just want time machine to use it in the basic sense, and to have it available should my harddisk fail at any point. I have a lot of programs that I cannot afford to lose. What do you guys think? Any advice would be appreciated!

GOOGLED: It seems most people suggest a external drive with twice the size of your laptop harddrive. If this is wrong let me know!

 

[iPhil]

Minimum double of your boot drive.. But @ any size it'll work but you will get a small time frame for restore period.. Since TM is using small TM partition ..

 

[Peterkro]

If you've got a clone of your harddrive already then 125gb should be fine as you'll only need to use timemachine to backup your home folder. Timemachine will delete oldest backups when your partition is finally full but it will ask first.

 

[atluten]

At the very minimum it should be the size of the hard drive on your computer. Realistically, you will want to go larger than that so you can keep multiple backups of your system. Try assigning space for the other three partitions to see how much is left for your Time Machine partition. Hopefully it'll be enough. Cheers.

 

[Silver-Fox]

I would say about double would be good

 

[Raid]

For Time Machine I have a backup external the same size as my boot disk, but I've excluded the System folder and a few others from back up as I have the install disks on hand if I have to re-install after and HD failure. I may loose my prefs in this kind of set up, but it's no big deal for me.

 

[peapody]

Wow thanks guys! What fast replies!

I have a 120gb hdd, and 87gb of that is filled up. I just delegated 150gb to TM, and hopefully that will be enough.

This is just for now, as I am testing out everything to make sure everything works as expected.I think I might have to double it up though, and that is too bad...I have too much music! Maybe I should have purchased a bigger drive!

 

[JohnStrass]

Wow thanks guys! What fast replies!

I have a 120gb hdd, and 87gb of that is filled up. I just delegated 150gb to TM, and hopefully that will be enough.

This is just for now, as I am testing out everything to make sure everything works as expected.I think I might have to double it up though, and that is too bad...I have too much music! Maybe I should have purchased a bigger drive!

I have an internal 500 gig drive on my iMac, and only about 180 gigs used( says about 300 gig is free. TM requires 1,019 GB of space. What the heck is going on? I have two users. Still, I cant' use my 500 gig external FW drive to back up an internal 500 gig drive that i not even half full.

Help please!