Time Machine Help

[julienko3]

I just got an external hard drive and need some help understanding backups. I just backed up all of my 80 gigs of MacBook hard drive space. I am going to manually back it up in about five minutes. Will it only add the files that I have changed?

I also have another question. I download games and other large files to my External Drive from my Mac and then move them over to a PC to play them. What is the best way to reserve maybe 40 gigs for only Windows files? Must I partition so one is a Mac format while the other is for PC? I do have MacDrive, but I don't know if that is something I want to install on many PC's.

Thanks.

 

[Arran]

... Will it only add the files that I have changed?

Yes. If you've not changed much it will take minutes (compared to hours for the initial 80GB)

 

[SnowLeopard2008]

Yea, hella fast if you don't change much, a little slower if you did some heavy file lifting.

 

[julienko3]

Okay,

Then help me understand this...

I have not changed anything since my last backup - an hour ago, and now Time Machine is backing up 1.3 gigabytes of files. - What the hell are these files and why is it backing them up?! NOTHING HAS CHANGED SINCE MY LAST BACKUP. I don't like it when a program takes up valuable space on my hard drive unless there is a good reason.

 

[Arran]

Okay,

Then help me understand this...

I have not changed anything since my last backup - an hour ago, and now Time Machine is backing up 1.3 gigabytes of files. - What the hell are these files and why is it backing them up?! NOTHING HAS CHANGED SINCE MY LAST BACKUP. I don't like it when a program takes up valuable space on my hard drive unless there is a good reason.

Not sure. My TM backs up about 14MB every hour - even if I haven't deliberately changed any files myself. My Mac hard drive contains about 470GB of data and my time machine drive is a dedicated 1TB unit with about 400GB free. It's been running like that for months, backing up hourly, 24x7, and managing it's space quite well, so I've just left it to get on with it.

One thing to note, however, is that if you make a tiny change to one large file (like a 1GB movie, for example) or even just rename or move it, Time Machine will back up the whole 1GB file again. Similarly, if you make a temporary (scratch) copy of some files, then TM will back them all up within the hour. I used to drop my temp working files (like movies) on the desktop, but stopped doing that when I realized what TM was doing. Instead, I now have a special folder on my desktop where I stash them. I have explicitly excluded this folder from TM backups (it's a setting under TM options). Once I've finished editing the movie, I drag it out of the excluded folder so that TM can then 'see' it and back it up.

There's a great thread over at Apple that goes into more detail: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1775065&tstart=75