I'm about to buy a MBP and have a 500GB external HDD and want to know how much space does Time Machine use. Does it make a mirror of my entire disc, just my media (pictures, video, music), documents, the os? How much does it take? I want to be able to store other big media files on my external HDD and not let it just be a mirror of my mbp hdd.
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Time Machine Space Ultilization Questions
- Thread starter Tydog07
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It will fill as much space as you give it. Partition the drive to limit the amount of space your TM backups consume.
So time machine will backup based on how much drive space I will allow it to have? How does the priority work if that is how it works? And is it true that iphoto makes a full copy of every image it imports?
Huh? There is no priority per se.
Regarding your iPhoto question, it copies every image imported into its library - that is by design. It also backs up any image you edit within iPhoto, also in its library.
What I mean by the priority is if I have used 250 GB on my internal drive and I only give 200GB to the partition/time machine, what will it copy?
Oh, I see now. Nothing, in that case - it'll refuse to perform any backups at all, due to lack of space, assuming you have nothing excluded besides the Time Machine drive itself.
Interesting, I assume my currently windows formatted hard drive will work with OSX? If so, can I edit how much space I give to a partition?
You will need to reformat the drive to the mac format first. Time Machine can't work with NTFS or FAT32 formatted drives. If you want to use the whole disk, just use disk utility and use the erase function and specify the format to be "Mac OSX Extended." If you want two partitions, go into "Partition" and select a 2 partition drive scheme, set the sizes and formats you want each partition to be in, and hit partition.
After that, just go into time machine and set up the partition you want as the new backup disk. At first, Time Machine will back up all the files on your computer, which will take a while. After the first back up, all subsequent back ups will only be of changed files. I would recommend having a Time Machine drive at least twice the size of your internal drive, so that Time Machine has enough room to keep backups for a longer period of time. When the drive fills up, it will start deleting old backups to make room for the new ones. The more space you have, the longer the backups can go back in time.
After that, just go into time machine and set up the partition you want as the new backup disk. At first, Time Machine will back up all the files on your computer, which will take a while. After the first back up, all subsequent back ups will only be of changed files. I would recommend having a Time Machine drive at least twice the size of your internal drive, so that Time Machine has enough room to keep backups for a longer period of time. When the drive fills up, it will start deleting old backups to make room for the new ones. The more space you have, the longer the backups can go back in time.
So now that I have my Macbook Pro and I have been using Time Machine for a few days, it's says that my 500GB drive isn't big enough for my Time Machine Backups! My internal hard drive is only 500GB and I have 25GB of space left on it, what gives? I spoke with a genius and among other things we discussed, she explained that it will do it's versions which will put exact duplicates of every file that had been changed. So what if I don't want it to do that? Can I just have it backup to its most recent state? I don't want to buy another hard drive, and if I do, when does it stop repeating itself, how long before it will start to eat away from the older backups?