Does TM need a dedicated external drive?

Also, can I just restore my Home Directory (iPhoto, iTunes, address book, etc.) from Time Machine and nothing else?
Thanks.

{quote:}Does TM need a dedicated external drive?{quote}
Although it's probably the best way to use TM, no,
it can also use an external that already has some folders on it,
it can also use a dedicated partition on an external drive,
of course for those who use a MacPro it can be another internal drive,
and,
another very interesting way to use TM I saw yesterday on these boards (thanks Michael):
split your internal drive into two partitions,
assign the second partition to TM backups,
and use your external HD to backup the whole system, that is,
backing up also the whole history of intermediate states that make the beauty of Time Machine
(compared to just another backup utility).
{quote:}Also, can I just restore my Home Directory (iPhoto, iTunes, address book, etc.) from Time Machine and nothing else?{quote}
Yes.
Select the folder you want to restore and just hit "Restore".

Similar Messages

Adding a Dedicated External Drive for Time Machine

Hello,
I want to use a dedicated external drive for Time Machine backup and another drive for a SuperDuper backup. Before even adding another drive, I'm already pulling and replacing usb connections from the back of my computer.
Can anyone tell me if a splitter is a workable solution? Something like this:
7-Port USB High-speed Hub with Splitter Cable -- http://www.shop4tech.com/user.htm?go=view_item&id=8997&r=183 -- or perhaps other recommendations ..
Thanks.

...I recall reading that USB 2 was faster ... but I think they said faster than FW 400, but the drive I have is FW 800.
USB2 is 480mbps and Firewire400 is 400mbps. On paper, this would appear that USB2 is faster than Firewire400. But USB2 cannot handle large data transfers very effectively. I can't explain the technicals, but suffice to say that the figures I gave of 40min-versus-2-hours-for-25GB is typical of Firewire400 versus USB2.
Firewire800 is 800mbps, so would potentially be even faster. However the physical hard drive that's installed in the Firewire enclosure would be the bottleneck as a normal "platter" hard drive is much slower than Firewire400 or 800. If it were an SSD drive, then you'd likely see a very significant difference.
But regardless, USB2 cannot keep up with a large data stream like Firewire can. Potentially USB3, which is up to 5Gbps, would be faster than either Firewire 400 or 800, although I suspect would be on par with Firewire3200 in the real world. However since there are no adapters for either USB3 or Firewire3200 for the Mac, it's a moot point for now. (Your drive is not USB3, there are only a few USB3 drives available, and you'd need a Mac Pro to add the adapter in anyway, if they existed.)
So are you saying that FW 800 is faster than USB 2.0 -- and that I should be using the FW connection to get better throughput? And that I can resume daisy-chaining multiple external drives through the one port?
Definitely Firewire would be faster than USB. And I have 5 external hard drives daisy-chained through a single Firewire800 port on my Mac. So daisy-chained Firewire is the way to go.
Like I said, for the small, incremental, hourly Time Machine backups, the speed difference is insignificant. But when the day comes that you have to restore your hard drive, (i.e.: hard drive dead so you buy new blank hard drive. Or you just want to replace with a larger drive,) if say your Time Machine backup is 80GB, that restore would probably take several hours over USB2. On my Firewire400 drive, my 100GB Time Machine restore of my Macbook Pro took about an hour and a half. (The data transfer was about an hour, but OSX took awhile after that to finish up the restore.) YMMV, of course, but IMHO, use Firewire over USB2 as much as possible. If you're lucky enough to have a Mac Pro or iMac and can use multiple internal hard drives or eSATA, then that would be even faster than Firewire800. Only owners of a Macbook Air or non-Firewire Macbook should resign themselves to USB2.

Does time machine need a dedicated external hard drive or can I partition it?

I am trying to figure out the best way to back up my husband's computer. He has too much data so I need to get about 80 GB off his computer on to an external drive and then need to back that up as well. Right now I have two external drives one dedicated to time machine and one that backs up as a carbon copy bootable backup. I think both external drives are 500GB, but he is on the computer and I don't want to fuss with having him get off right now. I ordered an additional external drive so I have some where for his 80 GB of his data. I can take one of the external drives currently used for time machine and partition it (mac OS journaled) and use one of the parts for time machine and the other for the 80 GB of data. Will this affect our ability to get data off of time machine in the event his 5 year old hard drive dies? The 80 GB of data includes important photos, so I would like them in two places. I would consider cloud, but he is running Leopard and I know that iCloud only works with Lion.

Thanks to everyone for all your opinions and thanks to baltwo for this TM FAQ website. Before asking this question, I browsed the internet and some people advised that a hard drive needed to be dedicated. It seems now that if I partition the external drive and have a big enough drive that I should be ok.

Does Time Machine require a dedicated external drive, or can it include other files?

After a misplaced library file, I'm having problems restoring some of the content on my MacBook Pro. I have a Time Machine backup on an external drive, but the drive also includes lots of other files that I want to exclude from the restore process. I'm concerned whether the Migration Assistant will scoop up everything on the drive.
The laptop is still running on Snow Leopard 10.6.8 for specific reasons (although I have Lion 10.7.5 on my iMac). I presume Time Machine and the Migration Assistant are the same on both operating systems -- but I'd better ask here first.
Thanks for any help with this question.

David Henderson7 wrote:
Another good idea. Thanks, FatMac!
For a long time, I was leery of putting too much stuff on one drive. It breaks, and you lose everything. But you're right -- the prices allow for even two 3TB externals that could manage backups of backups for paranoid types like me. And that's in addition to the internal drive.
Welcome to paranoidville. Staples has been selling Toshiba Canvio 3 TB externals for $120 and even though they must have green drives inside because they run a lot cooler than Seagates (of course they do, also, have ventilation), being fed from an SSD I've seen transfer rates of 130+MB/s connected to USB 3.0 ports. I have one set up with 4 partitions and maintain a rolling backup of the boot disk with BU dates recorded for each partition. A second Toshiba has a single periodic BU of the Mac Pro as well as a bootable backup of the rMBP and what passes for a Windows 8 backup of a Lenovo laptop. A third has the rMBP TM partition and a series of rMBP backups (that was originally used for testing and using the rMBP for a week without touching the rMBP SSD in case there was an image retention problem or some other issue, since the internal SSD can't be securely erased and I had 14 days to simply return it).
You can never be too rich, too thin or too backed up.

How does aperture store pictures on external drive?

Ok, I imported pictures to aperture, and I saved them on an external drive. The Library is on the internal drive. When I do editing, or try to share Pictures from Aperture, I have to connect my external drive. What I don`t understand is that I can drag these pictures to final cut, without connecting my drive. How is this possible? When does FCPX requires connection withe the "real media"?

What I don`t understand is that I can drag these pictures to final cut, without connecting my drive. How is this possible? When does FCPX requires connection withe the "real media"?
When you drag from the Browser you are exporting the JPEG previews stored in your Aperture library. It will depend on your settings in the Aperture Preferences > Preview tab, how good the resolution of these previews will be.
Many applications can access these previews using the Media Browser, even if your external drive with the originals is not connected. You need the originals if you use "File > Export" or if you edit the photos.

Does importing files from an external drive copy them to my internal drive?

Hi,
I'm a PSE newbie and this is my first post here. I have a question about importing files. I store all my pictures on an external drive. Does importing the files copy them to the Adobe folder? If yes, can I now work on a picture even if the external drive is disconnected?
Will I get an email notification when someone answers my question?
Thanks.

Hello dj_paige,
Thanks for your reply. I did get an email notification.
I've discovered that the photo files are actually copied over to the Pictures folder. Why do I need to keep my external drive connected when working on a file then?

Do I need to partition external drive?

I'm about to format my first external hard drive and am unsure whether I need to partition it as I'm new to this (my experience of backing up is limited to emailing files to my webmail provider's server). I bought the drive primarily for backup in case something catastrophic happens to my Mac but I understand an external drive has other useful functions; question is, are they useful to me?
One friend said I should make the external drive bootable.
Another said I could put my iTunes on it to free up space on my Mac. I have just over 50GB of music (but this is constantly expanding) and 147GB free on the Mac's drive.
Ideally I'd like to back up automatically every night.
All comments welcome, thanks.

Keep it simple. If you have the space just clone the entire internal drive to the external on a regular basis. Most all backup utilities have a scheduler option. You don't need to partition it. If you have a logical volume disc error the other partitions may still work fine. If you have a hard drive failure you can lose all the partitions.
Some uses for multiple partitions: different OS versions, if you want to boot in 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, or boot camp into WinXP or Vista, each of these can reside in it's own separate partition. Software developers (who can't afford multiple machines?) sometimes test software on different OS versions using a multiple boot system.
Some say that disc access times are slightly improved when searching over a smaller partition as opposed to the whole large drive, not sure if this is really true or not, or if the difference is really significant. So you might boot faster from a smaller partition with just the OS on it, and with User files on another partition, or apps might launch faster when read from a smaller partition, again that's just speculation.
(And, not applicable to your situation, but some older computers/OSs require it, for example the old out-of-production Beige Power Macintosh G3 Desktop computers can only boot OS X from the first partition <8GB in size on the built-in ATA bus. Also, OS 9 can not boot from a partition larger than 200GB.)

Encore CS4 does not recognize Blue Ray External Driver

I just bought a LG blue ray external drive writer which comes with Cyberlinks SW. From Premiere, I opened Encore to burn (build) a sequence on the LG Blue-Ray burner, but it does not work: - In En Project setting, the “Player” is grayed-out and only “Adobe Player” is displayed. - In En Build tab, when I choose the Format as Blue Ray and Output as Blue Ray Disk, the Build button is grayed out and Recorder shows None Found. However when I change the Format to DVD, the Build settings automatically change and the Recorder LG Blue Ray is shown. How do I make En to recognize the LG Blue Ray and burn in Blue ray format? Thanks, Vlad.

There are many threads in the Encore forum regarding reasons that burners are not seen. Most of these problems can be traced back to specific software, and most of the rest have to do with how the hardware is set up. You can find most of these in the main forum, and the Burning DVD sub-forum, with a Search.
First thing that I'd check is that your OS sees your hardware. In Windows, Control Panel>System>Device Manager. Check here (or within your OS) to make sure that it's just not a bad installation.
Good luck,
Hunt

Why does my computer rename my external drives?

I have three daisy-chained LaCie external drives (1, 2, and 3.) They have been working flawlessly for several years. Suddenly last month, my iMac renamed drive 2 as drive 1, drive 1 as drive 3, etc. It took me a bit to straighten it all out. Yesterday it did it again. What tha' HEY???!

I don't know if this applies, but I had a similar problem with a USB stick and the only way I found to prevent Spotlight from indexing the drive every time it was connected, was to create an empty file called .Spotlight-V100 in the root directory of the USB stick.
Strangely, my backup drive does not have that problem, I dragged it once in the Privacy pane of Spotlight and that seems to have done the trick.

My mac is runnug out of disk space. Do /i need to by external drives? how much memory should i get

My imac is running out of disk space. I download a lot of media from itunes. The HD movies and TV shows use so much space. Should I switch to the cloud, clean up my memory or buy an external memory drive? If i get an external drive how much memory is suggesyed? 1TB, 2TB or more?

Buy an external hard drive on which to save your media. The drive should be large enough to handle your entire iTunes Library plus how much you would anticipate adding to the library over the next few years. Then backup your existing library to the external drive: iTunes- Back up your iTunes library by copying to an external hard drive.
After you have backed up the library to the external drive you can configure iTunes to use the library on the external drive in iTunes > Preferences > Advanced. Change the path to the external drive. Once you do that quit and relaunch iTunes. It should now be using the library on the external drive. Now you can delete the library on the internal hard drive to free up the space.

Does TM automatically back up external drives or only internal?

I have two external drives....one that I am backing up to (500GB) and one that will hold all my iphoto/tunes files (1TB). Will TM automatically back up the photos/music drive directly to my TM drive?
Also, the above drive I just bought is an iomega 1TB drive. TM said it was wrong formatting for backing up to, but can I still copy my files to it and will TM back up those files (to the other ext drive) without having to reformat it? If not, how do I reformat it?

ecddesign wrote:
I have two external drives....one that I am backing up to (500GB) and one that will hold all my iphoto/tunes files (1TB). Will TM automatically back up the photos/music drive directly to my TM drive?
Time Machine can back it up, if it's formatted for a Mac. Look in the exclusion list in +TM Preferences > Options.+ If the drive is listed there +*in black,+* it means it's not being backed-up, but can be. All you have to do is select it and click the minus sign at the bottom.
But if it's listed +*in gray,+* it means it's not formatted properly. Time Machine cannot back it up, and you can't remove the exclusion. You'll have to reformat it (which means erasing everything on it).
Also, the above drive I just bought is an iomega 1TB drive. TM said it was wrong formatting for backing up to, but can I still copy my files to it and will TM back up those files (to the other ext drive) without having to reformat it? If not, how do I reformat it?
See #5 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum. Use the same procedure to format both drives.

Am I correct that Quantum does not support the eSATA external drives?

I bought an eSATA external drive when they first became available and I get a huge amount of storage space (something like 120 hours of HD).
Can you mix and match your old DVR with the new Quantum DVR? In other words, could I keep my old one up in the bedroom or is quantum all or nothing?
The 6 channels at once thing is appealing - particularly during football season ... but going backwards on recording capacity is a dealkiller, regrettably.
Solved!
Go to Solution.

BigDaveVT wrote:
So I've renewed my FIOS contract. If/when the six-channel DVR starts supporting eSATA, I'll reconsider switching to it. If the port is on there, it's a shame that they're not enabling it. I guess that they want an upcharge for extra capacity rather than letting you buy it yourself.
The VMS boxes are in a sense using older firmware such as the guide being the older version then what the multi room boxes use right now which is why the ports arent enabled yet. I'm sure once they release a new firmware upgrade they will be enabled.

Newbie here...do I need to add external drive as scratch disk

With only one firewire port, how would I connect (if necessary) an external drive plus my HDV deck?

Bingo. There are other benefits, too. Freeing up space on your main hard drive ought to keep your computer free of clutter, therefore helping it run faster. OUGHT TO... sometimes with a Mac, it doesn't really matter. Depends on what you're running, really.
But I use two external SETA hard drives all the time. One 250G and one 150G. One is my scratch disk, and one is my Time Machine. There's a little extra bonus to using an external, too. An external allows you to transfer quicktime files and other PC-compatible movies files to a PC!! That means that you can then store any extra stuff on a PC, too, as a further backup. I do that as well.
Hope I didn't confuse you too much!
Titan

Why does Firefox show as an external drive on my Mac when I download.

When I download Firefox using the 3 step guide for my Mac, the icon is shown as an external drive and not the usual Firefox icon. I drag it into the Apps folder as suggested, but when I try to follow the next steps to place in the dock it will not do it. I try clicking on the icon to open firefox but nothing works. Can you help? Operating system Mac 0S10 .4
== I tried to download Firefox for the first time ==
== User Agent ==
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10_4_11; en) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.1 Safari/533.16

Hi.
Thanks for getting back to me.... You are right I missed the bit where you have to drag the icon across on the display that pops up. It is not clear that you have to do this. I was dragging the dmg file from the desktop into my Apps folder which was the mistake. All good now and Firefox is working nicely. Thanks
Bernie

Do I need a dedicated hard drive?

I have a 320GB Firewire Seagate HD with some important files on it, but I would like to use it as my Time Machine drive as well (plenty of space). Question is: will TM erase things on the drive when I first use it? Will it format the drive in some way?
I hear I can put things on the drive AFTER I am using TM, but the important thing for me is to know if I can leave them on the drive as I backup for the first time.
Hesitant.... a little help?
Bryan

No it starts a TM backup file and just puts it right along your other files. Depending on how much room you have seems to be the limit on how far back the backups can go. I actually have TM using a partition I have a tiger back up in.

Does TM need a dedicated external drive?

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