Time Machine/Hard Drive Help

[Mac'nCheese]

My western digital mybook suddenly became read only. It won't record new timemachine back ups because of this. I used the disc utility to verify the disk drive and it told me to repair it. I tried but it said "Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files." So, is this disk drive shot? Its at least five years old, maybe more. The mac we have it hooked up to is only used for guests, games, quick internet stuff, nothing important. Time to throw this in the safe and move on?

Also, if this is shot, thinking of moving my couple year old WD hard drive from main imac to this one and just getting a new one for the "good" imac. I'm just a little confused on storage space. If my imac has 2 TB of storage, how much more storage would I need to get for the new hard drive because doesn't time machine store multiple backups and therefore need more space then your computer has?

 

[Weaselboy]

Yeah... if that thing is five years old and you are getting errors like that in Disk Util, I would not trust my data to that thing. Time for a dirt nap for that thing.

As far as the size of the new drive, it is only indirectly related to your internal drive size. It is more directly related to the amount of data you have or expect to have. Most recommend 1.5 to 2X the size of the amount of data you think you will have.

So for example, if you think the most total data you will ever have on that drive is 500MB, a 1GB drive would still give you 2X space with lots of room to save older versions of files.

Say you have a 3TB drive and only ever will have 200MB of data, a 500MB drive would give you over 2X the space for versioning. So you can see what I mean how the size of your internal drive is really only indirectly relevant here.

 

[Mac'nCheese]

Yeah... if that thing is five years old and you are getting errors like that in Disk Util, I would not trust my data to that thing. Time for a dirt nap for that thing.

As far as the size of the new drive, it is only indirectly related to your internal drive size. It is more directly related to the amount of data you have or expect to have. Most recommend 1.5 to 2X the size of the amount of data you think you will have.

So for example, if you think the most total data you will ever have on that drive is 500MB, a 1GB drive would still give you 2X space with lots of room to save older versions of files.

Say you have a 3TB drive and only ever will have 200MB of data, a 500MB drive would give you over 2X the space for versioning. So you can see what I mean how the size of your internal drive is really only indirectly relevant here.

Gotcha. Thanks for the advice. Think I'll move the other one from the better computer to the old computer and get a nice new one for the better computer.