T.Machine Questions

[SayCheese]

Hi all,

A couple of questions about time machine. I brought a 500Gb LaCie HDD and plugged it in. Time machine asked if I wanted it to be used as the backup drive. I brought it for that so I said yes.

I was surprised at the fact that it only backed up 37Gb of stuff. I thought that it made a clone of the entire HDD, which is currently at 110Gb. If so why did it not back up all 110Gb?

I have since gone into the Time machine feature and it is only displaying the current desktop. Not that anything has changed since it's first backup 12 hours ago I just expected to have an impressive display of screens going back. Will I only see these screens if I actually make a change?

Also if I double click on the LaCie drive icon on the desktop then I cannot actually see any files. I just get a blank drive even thought the get info command says that there is 37Gb used. What is going on?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Cheese

 

[Iamtherealwoody]

Time machine only backs up the data on your HD, so if you only have 37Gb used on your HD then thats all it'll back up. So is your entire HD 110Gb or have you used 110Gb of it?
Also Time Machine backs up every hour and keeps that record for a day (I think), keeps every weeks for much longer.

 

[powerbook911]

I'm not sure what's going on. Something doesn't sound quite right to me.

Did you format the hard drive into Mac OS X Journaled or whatever?

Maybe you should go ahead and use disk utility to do that, and then setup time machine again.

If you have 110 GB of stuff actually on the hard drive, it should be 110 GB or more in time machine.

Also, there is an options in time machine to exclude certain folders or whatnot. Make sure nothing is in there that you actually want backed up.

 

[SayCheese]

The drive said in the literature that it is preformatted in HFS+. Therefore I didn't do anything but plug it in.

My mistake, looking at the 'Get Info' for the internal HDD the entire drive is 110Gb but I have only used 37Gb of it. There is still 70+ Gb left free. So that clears that up.

However I still cannot see any folders or anything when I go to finder and look at the External HDD.