Time Machine issue for noob

[cageybee]

Hi All,

First post, so please be gentle.

I have been the proud owner of a Macbook Pro 2.5Ghz with 4GB RAM, running Leopard 10.5.6 for just under a year and I have never been able to get Time Machine to backup my files properly. Instead I have been backing up my really important files manually to an external NAS drive.

However, I would like to back up all files to an external USB drive using Time Machine. I have a Freecom USB2 drive which I purposely bought, but when I try to perform the initial back up I get a message telling me there isn't enough space.

My MacBook has a 250Gb HDD and my USB drive is 500Gb (465Gb available), so I have no idea why I am getting this message. I have ensured that no other devices are connected in case it was also trying to back up those (USB & NAS drive), but still get the same message. It says I need 698Gb of space to perform the full backup - where is it getting this from?!

Within the options it shows me a panel containing an entry 'Time Machine Backups' with a size of 154.4Mb, which I'm guessing is the directory that I am trying to save the backups to.

I'm probably doing something obviously stupid but would appreciate it if somebody could point it out for me.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[BobZune]

Welcome to the world of Macs and sanity!

I'll assume the drive you want to use for TM doesn't have any data on it (if there is important data, back it up somewhere else).

1. See http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/apple/le...ime-machine-but-theres-an-easy-fix-316573.php for partitioning and formatting (just the bullet items part will do). Give it a simple name like TMachine.

2. See http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2637/leopard_time_machine_setup/ for the rest of how to point TM to the disk you just formatted.

You may want to exclude virtual machines (if you have any), entourage folder etc. You can do a websearch for what to exclude to get hints. Good luck!

 

[cageybee]

Thanks for your help Bob.

I'm gonna have a look around to see what I can exclude from the backup (even though I thought the idea of a backup was that you can back up all your data?), but I guess I want to know why or how a 250Gb HDD converts to a 600Gb+ Time machine backup - where is this extra space coming from?

I have run a file called 'What Size' which shows where the space is being used up on the HDD, but still only shows a total of 214Gb, so shouldn't the backup file be the same size?

I'm from a Windows background, so I'm still learning OS X and this has really confused me (easily done!). Can anyone explain this and why I have to exclude folders and files from the backup?

 

[BobZune]

You should not be getting the error saying you need 600GB+ when your HDD is only 250Gb or so. Get OnyX utility and run the maintenance scripts, and clear out the caches. Then format the TM disk as pointed out, and do a back up. See if you still get an error.

As for "not backing up certain things" -- it is ok to back them up once in a while, but not during every backup; but let's say you have a 10 GB file (e.g., a virtual machine disk file). If a single bit in the file is changed, TM backs up the whole 10 GB again, since it can't tell what inside the 10GB has changed (some day, this might get better when we get ZFS file system) -- this has the possibility of filling the TM disk quickly, so your backups won't go far enough backward in time.

 

[cageybee]

Already used Onyx, but did it all again, plus I reformatted the drive in the way described using Mac OS X Extended format, but still getting the same message (attached).

Really don't know what to do now

 

[mcavjame]

Already used Onyx, but did it all again, plus I reformatted the drive in the way described using Mac OS X Extended format, but still getting the same message (attached).

Really don't know what to do now

It sounds like it is trying to include the NAS in the backup scheme. Go to your time machine preferences and click on Options button. Choose the drives not to be included in the backup.