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Time Machine FAQ

small question..
I have a 250GB hard drive that I have partitioned. My time machine partition (HFS+) will be 120Gb, but my iMac has a 500GB HDD.

Will I be able to use time machine with a partitioned external HDD?
 
vendettabass said:
small question..
I have a 250GB hard drive that I have partitioned. My time machine partition (HFS+) will be 120Gb, but my iMac has a 500GB HDD.

Will I be able to use time machine with a partitioned external HDD?
Click to expand...

As long as your not planning to backup more than the space you have available, you should be fine...
 
i'm pretty sure that time machine needs at least the space of the hard drive to work well

with your current plan, you'd only be able to use up to 130GB on your 500GB iMacs hard drive in order to use time machine decently.

in summary...get an external hard drive that is comfortably bigger than your internal hard drive (like 750GB)
 
TM will be so useful when upgrading HD's. Im getting my MacBook any day and want to upgrade it myself up to ~160GB and so being able to backup my data to my external drive and then copy that to the new HD will save me having to get a FW drive and using SuperDuper etc.
Excited now 🙂
 
Expresscard SSD on Macbook Pro?

Lexar (and a few others) came out with these Expresscard Solid State Disks (basically flash memory in Expresscard form factor) this year, apparently to sell them to Vista Notebook owners as a way to take advantage of Vista's ability to use flash memory as a disk cache. For example,

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820191058

It seems like this should also work as a small volume for TM on a MBP. I typically only backup my Documents folder daily, and archive the rest of my stuff to DVD's only when they change. I put everything I work on in Documents (code, text files, PDF's) so it never gets that big. Since these Expresscard SSD's apparently fit flush into a notebook computer, it would more or less (for me anyway) solve the problem of dragging around an attached external drive with my MBP in order to use TM. The 4GB model is < $60, but they are available all the way up to 32GB (for a price).
 
Switching Back Up Drives?

If you want to switch which drive you want to back up to, or run out of room on your back up drive and get a new one that has more space, is there a way to transfer your previous backups to that new drive? it would really suck to run out of room on your back up drive and not be able to use all that info you previously backed up! 😱

P.S. I'm sorry if this question has already been answered.
 
jdsam said:
If you want to switch which drive you want to back up to, or run out of room on your back up drive and get a new one that has more space, is there a way to transfer your previous backups to that new drive? it would really suck to run out of room on your back up drive and not be able to use all that info you previously backed up! 😱

P.S. I'm sorry if this question has already been answered.
Click to expand...

Id like to know that aswell, it would be useful to be able to upgrade it further down the road
 
jdsam said:
If you want to switch which drive you want to back up to, or run out of room on your back up drive and get a new one that has more space, is there a way to transfer your previous backups to that new drive? it would really suck to run out of room on your back up drive and not be able to use all that info you previously backed up! 😱

P.S. I'm sorry if this question has already been answered.
Click to expand...

You can probably just drag all your old backups into the new drive.
 
Just switch HD Volumes

jdsam said:
If you want to switch which drive you want to back up to, or run out of room on your back up drive and get a new one that has more space, is there a way to transfer your previous backups to that new drive? it would really suck to run out of room on your back up drive and not be able to use all that info you previously backed up! 😱

P.S. I'm sorry if this question has already been answered.
Click to expand...

When your TM backup Volume's space is exhausted just switch TM to use another Volume. It will perform another FULL backup to this new Volume on its first backup but then will do the normal hourly backups/snapshots and daily/weekly roll ups. The TM browser allows you to select which TM backup Volume you want to browse. You do not lose your previous TM backup info when you switch to using another Volume.

Copying a TM backup volume to another larger Volume may or may not work. Only time will tell. Using the Finder to drag and drop could run into issues for very large data copies. Usiing something like SuperDuper! tpo clone one TM backup volume to another may or may not work. Using some Terminal.app commands such as 'ditto -rsrcFork /Volumes/TM-vol-1 /Volumes/TM-Vol-2' may or may not work. Currently Apple simply says to select a new Volume and mentions nothing about copying.
 
*book

Alright, just finished reading through this thread. Great stuff so far, very educational. However, one major thing still needs to be addressed: mobile usage. For me, based on what I saw in the WWDC demonstration, TM is a simple versioning tool with backup capabilities. "Want to see the file from last week? Time Machine" rings a bell.

I was hoping that this feature was available to some extent on the local drive, so that as an iBook user I would be able to scan backwards in time a reasonable amount while on the go. When I hook up an external, TM does more magic and backs up everything to that. Great.

However, the going back in time feature would be quite useful to me when my external is NOT connected. Be nice to have at least a week's worth on the local drive, with the rest backed up to the external. Any Leopard testers have any experience with this? Any mobile users have any thoughts on this?
 
MonaLisa said:
Lexar (and a few others) came out with these Expresscard Solid State Disks (basically flash memory in Expresscard form factor) this year, apparently to sell them to Vista Notebook owners as a way to take advantage of Vista's ability to use flash memory as a disk cache. For example,

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820191058

It seems like this should also work as a small volume for TM on a MBP. I typically only backup my Documents folder daily, and archive the rest of my stuff to DVD's only when they change. I put everything I work on in Documents (code, text files, PDF's) so it never gets that big. Since these Expresscard SSD's apparently fit flush into a notebook computer, it would more or less (for me anyway) solve the problem of dragging around an attached external drive with my MBP in order to use TM. The 4GB model is < $60, but they are available all the way up to 32GB (for a price).
Click to expand...
Those things are wicked slow according the reviews I've read.
 
Aloha everyone,

I have a question I didn't see addressed anywhere else. I seem to remember hearing that TM can not back up to a RAIDed drive setup, such as the 1TB drive setup sold by Maxtor (2x 500GB drive at RAID 0, I think). Is there any truth to that? I plan on purchasing an additional 1TB external HDD, but would rather purchase the 2x500GB version, as it's cheaper than the 1x1TB version.

Mahalo in advance for your response,

HawaiiMacAddict
 
HawaiiMacAddict said:
Aloha everyone,

I have a question I didn't see addressed anywhere else. I seem to remember hearing that TM can not back up to a RAIDed drive setup, such as the 1TB drive setup sold by Maxtor (2x 500GB drive at RAID 0, I think). Is there any truth to that? I plan on purchasing an additional 1TB external HDD, but would rather purchase the 2x500GB version, as it's cheaper than the 1x1TB version.

Mahalo in advance for your response,

?HawaiiMacAddict
Click to expand...

If the Maxtor is a FW400/800 and/or USB device you are all set to go. This should not be a problem. Even if it were an eSATA connection it still should work for you.
 
I have a question about TM:

I use a MacBook, with a 160GB hard drive. I understand that I can partition it in half, and TM can use the second non booting partion. I know this is not an ideal backup solution because it is still the same physical drive. Is it possible to setup an external USB/FW drive for TM, and just plug it in before I go to bed at night? But this would be I can only recover a file when I am at home, and connected to the external drive, correct?
 
Skystar said:
I have a question about TM:

I use a MacBook, with a 160GB hard drive. I understand that I can partition it in half, and TM can use the second non booting partion. I know this is not an ideal backup solution because it is still the same physical drive. Is it possible to setup an external USB/FW drive for TM, and just plug it in before I go to bed at night? But this would be I can only recover a file when I am at home, and connected to the external drive, correct?
Click to expand...

You are correct. TM will notice the external HD backup Volume being attached and will initiate its next backup.
 
TM backup will alert you if HD too small

wackymacky said:
What I find strange is on the Leopard "Guided Tour" video: http://www.apple.com/macosx/guidedtour/ he's using a new iMac with at least a 350 gig HD, but if you look at when he selects the drive to use Time Machine on, the window says he is only using a 100 gig external drive. 😕
Click to expand...

The TM backupd process will examine the space available on your backup device and compare that with the amount of data that has to be backed up. If the amout to be backed up is larger than the available space on the backup device an alert meassage window will appear and the TM pref panel will indicate "Failed" with a small red "i" icon. Click on the red "i" icon and the warning text window will appear.

Note that TM will pad the amount of data to be backed up by some 20%. So say, you have 100 GB of data to be backed up then TM will want 120 GB of space on the backup device. The 20% pad is to ensure that TM does not bite into the last few remaining bits of disk space when the backup device gets very close to being full. This aspect can slow down i/o as the kernel has to scavenge all the last few disk blocks that typically are scattered all over the disk device. It's never a good idea to chew up the last 10% of a disk device for this reason. Time to switch to another HD Volume. 😉

The 20% pad is applied for every TM backup be it the first FULL backup or the hourly backups/snapshots. So if you have an hourly data churn of say 100 MB then TM will examine the free space on the backup device and ensure there's at least 120 MB available.
 
Nick12945 said:
You can do that. You just can't backup your mac if you get more than 100 gb in files.
Click to expand...

It's possible to configure TM to not backup the system-related files/data. If you configure TM to exclude the System folder on your boot volume you will encounter a confirmation window to make sure you understand that if you do this you will not be able to use the TM backup for restoring a system via the DVD Installer's Utility menu->Restore from Time Machine backup.

Avoiding backing up the System folder can save multi GBs of disk space (one time mind you) on the TM backup device.
 
bxs said:
If you configure TM to exclude the System folder on your boot volume you will encounter a confirmation window to make sure you understand that if you do this you will not be able to use the TM backup for restoring a system via the DVD Installer's Utility menu->Restore from Time Machine backup.
Click to expand...

Would you still be able to restore other data files using the DVD Installer Utility?
 
So as I understand it, you cannot use a external hard-drive mounted to a airport extreme? Thats too bad.
 
fideli said:
Would you still be able to restore other data files using the DVD Installer Utility?
Click to expand...

You can do that at any time but not via the DVD Installer. The DVD Installer will only present 'complete' TM backups to you along with date/time and the Mac OS X version info. A 'complete' TM backup is one that contains the System folder.
 
Backup multiple drives?

What happens if you have multiple drives in your computer or multiple partitions on your main drive? Will TM back them all up or will it just backup the boot disk?
 
Rivix said:
So as I understand it, you cannot use a external hard-drive mounted to a airport extreme? Thats too bad.
Click to expand...
Apparently you can't. You can in some developer builds but it got pulled in the final release. Hopefully, in the near future a software update will fix this.
 
Jambo said:
What happens if you have multiple drives in your computer or multiple partitions on your main drive? Will TM back them all up or will it just backup the boot disk?
Click to expand...

It will back up all partitions that it can. NTFS/FAT32 are pretty much excluded, as are flash drives/etc.
 
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