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Time Machine Questions

SayMilesAway

SayMilesAway

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 11, 2011
206
0
Florida
Hey everyone I am new to the forum and have a few questions. I have an external hard drive which I use to store my music, photos etc. I formatted it for use on Mac and now am using it for time machine as well. From my understanding time machine is just going to keep backing up until it completely fills my HD? Obviously I do not want this to happen so my question is can I partition my external hard drive to give time machine a limit or is there so easier method? Thanks!
 
SayMilesAway said:
Hey everyone I am new to the forum and have a few questions. I have an external hard drive which I use to store my music, photos etc. I formatted it for use on Mac and now am using it for time machine as well. From my understanding time machine is just going to keep backing up until it completely fills my HD? Obviously I do not want this to happen so my question is can I partition my external hard drive to give time machine a limit or is there so easier method? Thanks!
Click to expand...

Welcome to the forum. Why not partition using disk utility and assign one partition to Time Machine? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk079j_xZbU
 
SayMilesAway said:
Great! Thank you for the quick response. How big of a partition would you recommend for Time Machine? I realize the larger I make it the further back in time I can go.
Click to expand...
That entirely depends on how much data you have and the size of your external hard disk.

Just as an example, I have a 500 GB hard disk in my MacBook Pro and currently I am using about ~50 GB of it in total. I use a 750 GB Western Digital My Passport portable hard disk as my Time Machine volume which will give me enough room for quite some time, realistically I could probably get away with 300-400 GB because of my usage.

If you work with a lot of large files and make frequent changes to them, you will want to take that into account when calculating the size of your backup volume.
 
Yeah well any large files I will save to my external. My first time machine back up was like 3 days ago. I believe it was 16GB. I think I'll just create a 200GB partition.
 
Also keep in mind that you should be able to resize the partitions on your external hard disk using Disk Utility if the need arises, so there's nothing to worry about. :)

Have a great day!
 
Ooops! I made a mistake! So I typed in 200GB for my partition size but didn't hit enter. So it cut my external in half making my new Time Machine partition 499GB. So I resized it to 200GB but now that extra bit or disk is "missing." I want to have my Time Machine partition only 200GB and my other partition 800GB. What do I need to do? Thanks!

EDIT: Nevermind I got it! Thanks for everyones help!
 
One point about Time Machine from your original post--Time Machine does not just keep backing up until your disc is full--it will continue to back up even after your disc is full. It will ask the first time but you can tell it not to ask again and then when it needs more space, it will just delete the oldest data to make room for new data. My Time Capsule was full a year or so ago but it still continues to back up--and my oldest backup is still over 2 years old.
 
bobr1952 said:
One point about Time Machine from your original post--Time Machine does not just keep backing up until your disc is full--it will continue to back up even after your disc is full. It will ask the first time but you can tell it not to ask again and then when it needs more space, it will just delete the oldest data to make room for new data. My Time Capsule was full a year or so ago but it still continues to back up--and my oldest backup is still over 2 years old.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the clarification. If i would have not made a partition it would have eventually just taken over my 1TB external then correct?
 
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