TimeMachine, I'm still a little confused
So I somewhat understand the concept of TimeMachine.
Last night I bought a 320Gb External WD HDD, this is what I'll be using for my TimeMachine. It was quick and simple to set up, just plug it in, and my iMac did the rest. What I dont understand is, my first backup was 25Gb big, and its set to hourly back up. I'm going to run out of room FAST!!! Does TimeMachine write over the oldest backup when the HDD is full?
Last night I bought a 320Gb External WD HDD, this is what I'll be using for my TimeMachine. It was quick and simple to set up, just plug it in, and my iMac did the rest. What I dont understand is, my first backup was 25Gb big, and its set to hourly back up. I'm going to run out of room FAST!!! Does TimeMachine write over the oldest backup when the HDD is full?
Comments
So I somewhat understand the concept of TimeMachine.
Last night I bought a 320Gb External WD HDD, this is what I'll be using for my TimeMachine. It was quick and simple to set up, just plug it in, and my iMac did the rest. What I dont understand is, my first backup was 25Gb big, and its set to hourly back up. I'm going to run out of room FAST!!! Does TimeMachine write over the oldest backup when the HDD is full?
The issue with Time Machine is that no drive will ever be big enough to contain everything sent to it, because eventually it will fill up. It's fine if you need to have every version of everything, and one must be mindful to maintain enough space on the drive used by Time Machine, but that comes at a cost. The cost is eventually having multiple drives to hold all of the info.
The alternative is a cloned drive, that will never have more info on it than the drive it's copied from. So, if your internal drive is 320 gigs, your cloned copy will never be larger than 320 gigs.
It's a choice as to which method you prefer. BTW, Time Machine and cloning don't go together, it's for incremental backups.
So I somewhat understand the concept of TimeMachine.
Last night I bought a 320Gb External WD HDD, this is what I'll be using for my TimeMachine. It was quick and simple to set up, just plug it in, and my iMac did the rest. What I dont understand is, my first backup was 25Gb big, and its set to hourly back up. I'm going to run out of room FAST!!! Does TimeMachine write over the oldest backup when the HDD is full?
Yes, Time Machine will write over the oldest backup. More specifically, it will prune backups. It will not backup 25 gigs for every backup. After the first backup it only backs up what files have been added or changed. So, if in the next hour, you have not added or changed any files the backup will be tiny.
You can also exclude folders you don't need to backup. You can even change the backup times if you prefer
Here's a good synopsis
http://www.macworld.com/article/5228...eotimemac.html