Time Machine Question

[butterwm]

I bought the 2TB Time Capsule yesterday for backup. I have two MacBook Air's and an iMac that are sharing it for their backups. Initial backup using time machine on the first Air was 50GB and the other was 85GB. I haven't backed up the iMac yet but we have most of our files there so I am imagining at least 100GB.

After the initial backup on my Air, it did an hourly backup and even though I hadn't downloaded anything or changed anything it was still 250MB. It seems that time machine wants to do an initial backup, weekly backup, daily backup and hourly backup. I am wondering with these settings how long it will take until my 2TB Time Capsule is full. (I understand that the time machine will start deleting old backups once it's full to make room for the new ones)

My question, are all these backups every hour necessary or just overkill? Did you modify your time machine settings so it didn't backup so often?

 

[SSandy]

This amount of data on follow-up backups is not unusual at all. Don't forget that while the standard settings will do hourly backups, only one daily backup will be saved as you move beyond 24 hours, so 23 of the 24 hourly backups will be removed. Beyond that, after you've been using it for more than a month, Time Machine will only save weekly backups. So it will take quite a while to fill up the 2 Tb unit even backing up three systems. Then, if it does fill up, it will start deleting the oldest, supplemental backups. Seems to be pretty smart -- I've restored an entire system using Time Machine and recovered everything even though I'd been using it for years.

If you'd still like to mess with the timing of backups, there are several third party software programs that allow you to change the backup intervals.

 

[TyroneShoes2]

The problem with TM is it is so arrogant as to have one configuration setting other than "off", which is "full on". We are expected not to worry our pretty little heads about how TM works under the hood, but it can fill HDDs faster than we might choose, should we have real control over when and how many backups are made.

http://www.geardiary.com/2009/05/31/take-control-of-time-machine/
http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/


Above is a link to TimeMachineEditor (not to be confused with TM Manager) which gives you as a user more granularity regarding when you want backups performed. Freeware; works great. Steve probably would not approve. What he doesn't know won't hurt him.

 

[mchalebk]

As long as the TM drive is sized properly, filling up the drive isn't a problem. You will still have weeks worth of backups. I have no idea when my TM drive might have filled up and don't care. It's just not important.

 

[butterwm]

I didn't make any changes to the size or partition the drive. It shows 2TB and I am just using the drive for back-ups.