My girlfriend has recently ran out of space on her MBP internal hard drive. She's a free lance photographer and we know that her photo collection stored in "Pictures" is what's taking up all of her space. She has an external hard drive and so she's made a complete Time Machine backup on that. Now she wants to completely delete all of the "Pictures" folder from her MBP since they're all now saved on her external hard drive. In the future, will Time Machine replace the backed up "Pictures" folder with her new empty one, or will it leave all her old backed up photos alone?
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Time Machine question
- Thread starter plainwhitetay
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Having only one copy of anything isn't a backup. If the external drive fails (and it eventually will) she'll lose everything.
I have a NAS with TM that also does weekly backups of itself to a remote drive.
I have a NAS with TM that also does weekly backups of itself to a remote drive.
Then you'd be wise not to delete anything important from her MacBook. Also consider Dropbox or skydrive to keep critical file.
PS external drives are dirt cheap, data recovery is not.
It will leave her old photos alone till it fills up then it will purge the oldest files. It's a good backup solution but a poor archiving solution.
Time machine will make a perfect copy of BOTH the entire internal disk drive as well as any external drives that are plugged in. Then if she deletes a file in either of those places TM will still keep a copy FOR A WHILE if it has the space to spare. If the disk filled up TM will delete old files that you deleted to make room for newer files.
The best solution is this... (I assume she is using Aperture but iPhoto works about the same way.)
(1) Move all the older photos to a large external disk and keep them all inside an Aperture/iPhoto library. Make a few copies to other external disks and keep at least one copy in doe far away place
(2) test that your backup copies are readable. Test ALL of the backup copies. Then think if your testing was good enough.
(3) unplug any external drive(s) then delete the photos from the internal drive
(4) create new iPhoto/Aperture library on the internal disk and continue as before. When she is done with a project or assignment move the images to the external library. This way she can use the Macbook without need to drag about an external drive.
Buy a disk drive for Time Machine and don't use it for any other purpose. This drive needs to be about 1.5 times as large as all the data you have on all of your disk drives that you would plug in at once. In your case 1.5 or 2 times the size of the sum of the internal and external drive. Or just get the biggest one you can get (currently this is 4GB)
5) in addition to Time Machine make periodic backups and rotate them to some off site locations.
+++++
The "law" of backups is to always make sure..
1) that data exists on at least three different physical media, even while a backup is under way. And,
2) that data exists in at least two different geographical locations even while a backup is underway.
if you backup software over-writes old data or requires the disk to be in the same building as the data being backed up you need one more disk drive so you can always have one rotated off site.
Buy a few fire safes and keep them in different buildings, rotate the drives around.
Yes it costs $150 to buy a good 4GB external but so what. Think in terms of capital equipment cost ratio to income. $150 or even $1,500 for 10 drives is not much.
Thank you very much! I think she'll follow through with what you said for now. Work on getting more external drives in the near future. Thanks again