Time Machine Help

[pur3h8r3d]

I just got a 750GB Hard Drive. I would like to use it for Time Machine but I really don't want to use the whole drive. In fact I really don't want any more than a weeks back up. Time Machine doesn't really seem to have too many options. Is there any way I can set it up to where it only backs up the last 7 days? For what I do I would never need anything more than an image of my disk and 7 days of info. Any help would be great. Thanks.

 

[Poncho]

Plug in the hard drive, go to Disc Utilities, then partition the drive into two parts, making sure one part has enough space to take your Timemachine backups. The other part you can use to put whatever you want on.

 

[JimmyDThing]

I just got a 750GB Hard Drive. I would like to use it for Time Machine but I really don't want to use the whole drive. In fact I really don't want any more than a weeks back up. Time Machine doesn't really seem to have too many options. Is there any way I can set it up to where it only backs up the last 7 days? For what I do I would never need anything more than an image of my disk and 7 days of info. Any help would be great. Thanks.

I'm not sure that Time Machine is what you want if all you need is the previous week's stuff.


You can change the frequency of the backups by text editing /System/Libraries/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto.plist

You just have to change the 3600 in <integer>3600</integer> to the number of seconds between backups... I have mine set to 86400, which is once a day. You might have some permissions problems though...



As for deleting previous backups? There's no real point... unless you dramatically change your hard drive usage every week, it won't save you any space on the drive. The way Time Machine works is it makes one complete back up and then just keeps track of changes since the last backup.