Will TM fill up all space in my NAS with time?

[pm79]

Hi all,

I have got a MBP (mid 2009) model running Lion and I have got 500gb ssd in main bay and 1tb Hard drive in optical bay in it. I have just installed synology ds212j with 2x 3tb hard drives in Synology Hybrid Raid.

I want to do back ups of my MBP and would like to do what's the best way of doing it. One option is using Time machine back up to NAS but since TM keeps all previous backups till Hard drive is full, my concern is with time it will fill up my NAS until is full which I obviously don't want. Am I right in thinking that?

What are my other options?

Is CCC a better option for this? Can that be set up as automatic backup to NAS like TM?

 

[maflynn]

I can't say how Synology works but on my QNAP NAS, I specify the maximum space that TM can use, so it won't consume all of the space

 

[pm79]

I can't say how Synology works but on my QNAP NAS, I specify the maximum space that TM can use, so it won't consume all of the space

So for 1.5tb of my internal hard drive should i specify 1.5tb in NAS for TM backup or more or less?

 

[Weaselboy]

So for 1.5tb of my internal hard drive should i specify 1.5tb in NAS for TM backup or more or less?

You are saying you have 1.5TB of internal storage space, but is all that space used? If you are only using half of that, there is no need for that much Time Machine storage space.

I would set aside one and a half times the Time Machine storage as you are using on internal drives. So, for example, if you internal drives have 700MB of data, set aside about 1GB (700*1.5) of Time Machine storage.

There is no hard and fast rule here. It just depends on how far back your want to be able to access old versions of Time Machine backups. Also depends a lot on your usage. If you work with a lot of 2GB video files and backup versions of those files each day, the backup drive will fill up very fast. Then you have someone like me who only adds a few documents here and there, to the Time Machine backups expands very slowly after the initial backup.

 

[pm79]

You are saying you have 1.5TB of internal storage space, but is all that space used? If you are only using half of that, there is no need for that much Time Machine storage space.

I would set aside one and a half times the Time Machine storage as you are using on internal drives. So, for example, if you internal drives have 700MB of data, set aside about 1GB (700*1.5) of Time Machine storage.

There is no hard and fast rule here. It just depends on how far back your want to be able to access old versions of Time Machine backups. Also depends a lot on your usage. If you work with a lot of 2GB video files and backup versions of those files each day, the backup drive will fill up very fast. Then you have someone like me who only adds a few documents here and there, to the Time Machine backups expands very slowly after the initial backup.

Thanks for that.. that was quite helpful. Can this quota for TM backups be changed later on depending on our circumstances?

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I found the answer.. the quota can be changed later anytime...

 

[Weaselboy]

Thanks for that.. that was quite helpful. Can this quota for TM backups be changed later on depending on our circumstances?

I know with a normal USB attached disk you could use OS X Disk Utility to just enlarge the partition, but I am not at all familiar with how Synology handles this on their NAS. Maybe check in their support forums?