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Time Machine - Practical question?

F

fstfrwrd

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 6, 2008
186
0
Belgium
I'm buying a new MacBook Pro when they're released ... so hopefully pretty soon.

Now I have a MacBook, running OS X Tiger and an external Iomega firewire drive (1TB capacity)

I was wondering - since the new MacBook Pro will have Leopard and Leopard has Time Machine - something about the back-ups in Time Machine.

I download quite a lot of movies and store them on my external drive.
I'm also planning to store my back-ups on that drive.

Now, let's say I download a movie onto my MBP, then move it to the external (where all my movies are) and delete it from the MBP HD.

Will Time Machine itself still back that movie up then?
If so, that would be a waste of space because it would be stored twice on the same drive.

If this is the case, is there any way to disable this?
Or maybe a backdoor like downloading my files directly onto the external drive?

Thanks in advance
 
You can just download your movies to a separate folder and exclude that from the back-ups.
 
You can excluded certain locations from Time Machine backups under System Preferences.

It's very easy to setup. You simply click the + button to specify a location.
 
fstfrwrd said:
Now, let's say I download a movie onto my MBP, then move it to the external (where all my movies are) and delete it from the MBP HD.

Will Time Machine itself still back that movie up then?
If so, that would be a waste of space because it would be stored twice on the same drive.

If this is the case, is there any way to disable this?
Or maybe a backdoor like downloading my files directly onto the external drive?

Thanks in advance
Click to expand...

Depends on how you use Time Machine. If you have it setup to auto backup then yes it will backup that movie on the harddrive if that file is not removed before the next backup (which is every hour btw). However, if you manually use Time Machine, then once you delete the file from the hard drive time machine will not back it up.

You can also setup folders for time machine to exclude in backups just as the others said.
 
Caches, Applications and Folders which change frequently or backed up by other means should be excluded from TMachine!
 
Alright, thanks you very much guys.

One last question though ...
I can back-up my system on the same drive I use for media storage, right?
 
Absolutely! I do the same (You'd think that I'd keep a 1TB drive just for backing up 3 notebooks:p)

P.S.: I do hope that you make DVD backups as well!
 
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