Put a limit on Time Machine!

[zali0n]

I'm going to upgrade my Core Duo Macbook Pro in the next few days with a new 320gb HDD. My external disk for which also includes my Time Machine Backup is only 250GB. Obviously one is larger than the other, will this cause a problem? If so is it possible for me to put a limit on how much space Time Machine can take up?

If for example I tell it to exclude /System and /Library from the backup can I still in future when install a fresh copy of OS X, restore from a Time Machine backup?

 

[erostratus]

No, if you want to be able to restore to a fully bootable backup, you can't touch the /System and /Library directories. For my machine, I exclude my Downloads folder, which has a ton of large files, including torrents, as I figure I'm willing to lose stuff I haven't sorted and installed already.

One of the things that always has bothered me about Time Machine is that you can't see which files are being backed up. Someone like you could really use this feature, as you might be able to see where you can save space (by not having Time Machine back up certain files). I wrote an article at Mac Guru Lounge on how to see what Time Machine is backing up each time. There are a couple of ways to do it. You'd be surprised how much data changes every time you do the backup.