time machine question

[poohat1000]

Is it possible to set say 20gb of space on my external HD and give that to TimeMachine - having it only use that much space and deleting old files as it goes over?

Can't afford a dedicated HD at the moment

 

[RaceTripper]

Is it possible to set say 20gb of space on my external HD and give that to TimeMachine - having it only use that much space and deleting old files as it goes over?

Can't afford a dedicated HD at the moment

You would have to create a dedicated partition of the restricted size. Otherwise, TM uses as much of the drive as is available.

 

[poohat1000]

ok HFS right?

Is there a minimum size requirement?

 

[Scottyk9]

Time machine starts off backing up almost everything on your hard drive, then makes incremental backups as needed when changes to files occur. If the external space is less that your machines HD space, I am not sure that time machine will function.

 

[RaceTripper]

Time machine starts off backing up almost everything on your hard drive, then makes incremental backups as needed when changes to files occur. If the external space is less that your machines HD space, I am not sure that time machine will function.

Time Machine preferences allows you to set ignored directories, so one could vastly limit what gets backed up. For example, I tell TM to ignore all my local copies of folders under source control (SVN, CVS) as well as my iTunes library.

I wish I could tell TM to ignore files specified by a filter. I'd like to skip backup up all my camera raw files, since I burn those to DVD when I copy them from my CF cards. But I don't want to ignore the folders they're in because I need to backup the sidecar files generated when I start editing the pictures. That would save me many GBs of space on my TM disk. If I ever needed to restore from DVD I could write a script that would determine what to restore based on the sidecar files I have.

 

[poohat1000]

eah thats the thing, I can't afford an ext drive at the moment - but in the meantime i'm pretty content to just have my documents folder backed up - which is never mroe than 2 gig, will TM do everything at once straight away - or can i prompt it to say ONLY this folder please matey?

 

[THX1139]

eah thats the thing, I can't afford an ext drive at the moment - but in the meantime i'm pretty content to just have my documents folder backed up - which is never mroe than 2 gig, will TM do everything at once straight away - or can i prompt it to say ONLY this folder please matey?

You have to do the opposite. You have to tell TM everything you DON'T want backed up. I haven't tried it, but I suppose you could select all of the root folders you don't want backed up, but NOT select your documents folder. If you have other drives, you would have to include those too. The only thing to not include, is the folder you want backed up. Not sure if TM is smart enough to do that. Be sure and let us know if it worked.