How big is my backup?

Each new backup folder appears to store a complete copy of every file on my hard drive. I realize that this is through the magic of the file system and that only the changed data is actually stored. But, I have no way of knowing how much space any particular backup is actually taking up, right? (Short of sitting there and waiting until the hourly backup occurs)
Some very strange things result from the multi-linked file structure. I set the "View Options" to calculate all sizes. It doesn't seem to make any difference and the folders sizes are shown as --. But if I do a Get Info on the folder it calculates the size (after a lot of churning) and sticks updates that size in the folder list.
For my system, that number for my system is usually around 160GB.
Here's the strange thing. I looked at my machine this AM and the from the 10:12PM backup folder until the 5:12, all had sizse displayed. (I hadn't done any Get Info's past midnight).
But here's the really strange part, the 4:12AM backup folder was 159GB and the 5:12AM was listed as 76GB.
I did a Get Info on the 6:12 AM and after 30 minutes didn't have an answer on size but the 8:12 appeared without me doing anything and it said it was 159GB.
And to make matters all the stranger, the backup folder in which all this is stored in is listed as 157GB, ie it is 2GB smaller than any of it's parts.
There's really no way I can tell, short of writing the day by day free space on a piece of paper, how much my backup is taking or how long I have until I fill the drive, right?

and I calculate DC how?
I think I have to look at my free space reported, write that down on some paper using a pencil, wait around an hour till Time machine completes another backup. Write the new free space number down with my pencil.
Then DC = First number - Second number
and I have no way of knowing if the DC I calculated is typical. I can't look in the past and see how it was say, 3 backups ago. I can only compare the DC for the last backup if I wrote down the disk space from the previous one.
So, I better not lose my piece of paper.

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How do I find out how big each TM backup is?

Why?
Under Entourage, each TM backup was (as far as I can establish) the whole Entourage 'Database' which for me was 4GB (so long as you were using email, the database was changing constantly).
Having migrated to Outlook 2011, where the emails are now in clustered folders, I'd like to confirm that each incremental backups is a fraction of their size under Entourage.
This matters as the huge database backups meant that i was getting rapidly reducing backup history.
Thanks!

You can't determine the size of any backup on Leopard or Snow Leopard.
You can see exactly what was backed-up on any one backup, via one of the apps in #A2 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
But yes, Entourage is one of the apps that puts everything into a single file/database, so the whole thing must be backed-up when there is any change at all. See #D4 in the above link.
Most folks exclude it from Time Machine, and back it up separately.
You can delete all backups of it, if you want. See #12 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.

External backup drive - how big?

Is there a way of calculating how big a backup drive I need for my Time Machine backups?
My current one is now full and is deleting old backups.
My iMac is using only 500,000 GB out of an available 3T hard drive. (I know - it's a lot of hard drive but when I had the old drive replaced, that's what I got.)
Anyway, should I buy a 2T external or a 3?

2TB is about the biggest of the portable drives..
There are good ones from Toshiba.. and WD passport also work well for most.
Sadly there is always bad batches.. drives seem to often have a bad reputation when it just happens to be one drive..
Buy one and see how it goes.. you don't really have much choice.. but I would also ensure you backup to a different brand.. at least if they both die they tend to die on different days. Flawed drives tend to go all at the same time.. I have had NAS setups where 3 drives died within a week of each other. And replacement drives I bought for a business.. all died 12months later within a few days of each other.. So I learned my lesson.. buy different ones.. and never be without current backups.. preferably several of them.

What size Time Capsule - i.e. how big are Time Machine Backups

Hi all,
Just trying to decide which Time Capsule to get...my question is basically how big are Time Machine backups.
For example I have a MacBook with 100gb harddrive. At the moment about 80gb in use.
I assume the Time Capsule will immediately backup that 80gb but how big are the incremental backups. If I modify about a GB's worth of data each day, does this GB get moved to the capsule or is Time Machine cleverer than this and only backups the changes at byte level for example.
Any pointers, thoughts, etc. much appreciated.
Michael.

I have an iMac with a 500GB hard drive and a MacBook with an 80GB hard drive. The MacBook is nearing capacity but the iMac has around 90GB of data (the Time Machine backup is around 93GB). I will likely opt for the 1TB version as I am eligable for a Government discount bringing the cost down to £303 (£183 for the 500GB version). As it's unlikely that it will be easy to upgrade the Time Capsule HDD then I'm looking at future proofing as I do not want to have to repurchase in a few years. I'm also likely to buying a second MacBook or MacBook Pro in the coming months so it does make sense.
Secondly, you can use the Time Capsule as a shared storage area as well as for the Time Machine function.

How large of a backup drive should I get for my 500 GB MacBook Pro?

I have a MBP with a 500 GB hard drive. How large of a backup drive should I get for time machine backups? If I get a 500 GB drive will it just back up everything twice (as I have 250 used) and then delete the second backup every time it rebacks up so I will just have 2 backups? Or does time machine only backup changes every time it backs up? Thanks in advance.

tehsnyderers wrote:
OK, so I ordered a Seagate 1.5 TB external drive. That should suffice for my iMac w/ 320 GB and MBP w/ 500 GB shouldnt it?
Probably. See #1 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip* at the top of this forum.
Should I just partition it 750/750? or maybe 600/600/300
Use roughly the same proportions as the data on the two Macs, adjusted for how you use them. If one changes lots of big files frequently and the other doesn't, give more space to the first one.
so I have space to put random files as well?
If you put important stuff on a 3rd partition, you can have TM back it up, too (unless the drive is attached to your Airport), but it will send you a warning reminding you that it's not a good idea to have both originals and backups on the same physical disk. You'll be much better off finding another way to back that up, perhaps archiving to CDs/DVDs.
Am I able to partition it and use it with my airport extreme?
Officially, no: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/15139.html
and: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2426
But some folks (including me) are doing it anyway!
So if it works for you, just be aware it's technically unsupported, and you'll get little or no help from Apple if there are problems. And a future update may break it.

How big of a hard drive upgrade in 500GB TC?

I have a 500GB TC. If I want to swap the internal drive, how big of a drive can I put in? I ready conflicting reports. I would like to put a 2TB drive if I can.

I had a 1.5TB drive that I just installed in my 500gb TC a few days ago. The drive (a Western Digital green drive with 32mb cache) came in a WD enclosure, which I cracked open to get the drive out. It was probably formatted as FAT32 from the factory. After installing it in the TC I started up the Airport utility and clicked on my TC, then clicked the manual button, clicked the disks tab, and selected the TC drive (I also have a 1TB external USB drive attached to it) and selected "erase." It's all configured and ready to backup to via TM now. Note that the TC did retain all of my wireless configuration so there was no need to reset the security settings, etc.
In all it only took about 10 minutes - I heated up the rubber base with a hair dryer, carefully peeled it away from the TC, removed the 10 or so small screws that held the metal base on the TC and lifted it away. The fan is attached to it and you can just tip the base to the side. The hard drive lifts right out after you unplug the cables to it and peel off the thermal probe that sticks to the drive. I unscrewed the 4 metal posts that were on the 500gb drive that had been in the TC and attached them to my new drive. Then I just set the new drive in place, plugged the wires in, attached the thermal probe with the sticky tape that had mounted it to the original drive, dropped the metal base in place, screwed it back down, and slapped the rubber base back in place.

How big a hard drive do I need for iMac and Time Machine?

Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere already. I am going to buy an iMac, probably the new 24" with a 320G internal HDD. I already have one Lacie external 320G HDD so I was wondering whether I can use this for Time Machine backups, or do I need to buy a bigger one? If so, how big? Is there a rule of thumb for working out how much hard drive space you need to have for Time Machine, for instance if I were to buy the 500G iMac what would I need?
thanks.

I agree with the "double the size" rule of thumb. You should also consider how much of the 320GB you are actually using and are likely to use in the next year or two. After all, it's the amount of storage you use that matters, not the size of the disk. Disks will very likely be cheaper soon. You should also keep in mind that TM deletes old archive data when it runs out of disk space. So as long as you have more disk space than you have data to back up, TM will work, though you will lose older versions of your data.
So if your 320GB drive only has 100GB used and you're not the kind of person who eats up disk like there's no tomorrow, the 320GB drive should be fine for now. If you expect that 320GB disk to be full soon then a 750GB TM disk is more like what you need.
The same logic applies to a 500GB iMac. If you only expect to use 250GB in the next year or two then a 500GB TM disk should be OK. A 1TB drive will be a lot cheaper next year or the year after.

I am looking to back up my MAC, and I need to know how big of an external hard drive I need

I am looking to back up my MAC, and I need to know how big of an external hard drive I need. How do I determine this?

Well, they recommend at least 2 - 3 times the size of your hard drive if you are using Time Machine because that keeps making backups until it runs out of space (and then deletes the oldest to make room for the newest).
However, if you prefer to have a bootable clone as a backup, you need about the same size as your hard drive since it is a perfect copy of your system (unless you want to partition and keep an older clone separately).
So, check to see how large your hard drive is and go from there.

How big should my external hard drive be for me to use Time Machine?

i am a student and dont have a significant amount of files and that on my computer so how big shuld my external hard drive be?
I will be using a normal external hard drive so will i be getting the full and the important features out of time machine if i do this?

There are two questions you should ask yourself:
1. How long will it take me to fill up my internal HDD?
2. How far back chronologically do I realistically expect to have go to retrieve data?
I submit that in the vast majority of cases, a HDD of the same size as you have in your MBP will be ample. If things change, adjustments can be made well in advance. Its the very rare user that will generate multi GBs of data and file changes every session.
As an example, I have a 750GB HDD in my MBP and a 750 HDD dedicated to Time Machine. The oldest backup goes back 7 months. At the rate that I update Time Machine, I expect the Disk to be filled and start deleting old data in about 3 months. For me, that is more than sufficient.
There is another aspect of backup strategy you should consider. I would highly reccomend that you have a second external drive to store your most important files that may be duplicates of those in Time Machine. All HDD will fail. You just never know when that will happen. If your Time machine disk expires, this way you are not left in a calamitious situation.
Though some of my views may be in the minority, the final decision is always yours.
Ciao.

How big a Time Capsule do i need, I'm totally new to Mac!

Hi, how big a Time Capsule do I need in order for it to work as my backup? Let say if I bought an Imac with 2 TB HDD + 256 GB SSD and with that, bought a 2 TB Time Capsule for backup, would that be enough or would I need to buy a 3 TB Time Capsule? Thanx!

But if I buy the Imac I wrote about in my previous question (2 TB HDD + 256 GB SSD), would I then need to buy two, 2TB Time capsuls,
If you plan to fill up most of the space on the iMac right from the start, then you might need more space. Few users ever use more than about 75-80% of the space on their computers. I was figuring you would fill up about 75% of the drive....around 1.5 TB or so. 3 TB backup would be about right.
If I buy 1 TB HDD + 256 GB SSD, then 2 TB Time Capsule will be enough, right?
Correct.

How big domain.sites can be without problem?

Ok. My site right now is just 60 MB so I wonder How bigger can it get?
Because until now I haven't had any problem using iWeb but people frequently is posting problem with publishing and alike.
So sometimes I'm afraid of getting in problems if my sites get larger.
Can you show me how big is your website in iWeb please?

MacFirePro2:
Welcome to the Apple Discussions. I have a number of iWeb domain files that are above 100 MB going up to 256 MB. I use iWebSites to manage multiple sites.. It lets me create multiple sites and multiple domain files.
If you have multiple sites in one domain file here's the workflow I used to split them into individual site files with iWebSites. Be sure to make a backup copy of your original Domain.sites files before starting the splitting process.
This lets me edit several sites and only republish the one I want.

How do Pros manage backup?

This week a horrible thing happened. Ad mentioned in my other post, i lost my time machine drive to some form of hardware/software corruption. And i did the huge mistake of cut-pasting my archived iPhoto library onto the same media! Today i realized that i didn't have a single copy left of the 10 year of photographs!!!
Infact, before i realized that my iPhoto library was on it, i even made an attempt to erase the partition! Luckily, it failed. I am glad that i wasn't able to erase the drive.
Now i have deployed 'data rescue 3' for the job of recovering my drive.
But i learnt an important lesson the hard way, to not depend on one physical media for backups! I had also almost ordered the LaCie cloud box 4tb nas storage when i learnt from the internet that its a single hdd inside. That simply means i was about to repeat the disaster on a much bigger level a few years down the lane.
So can someone tell me how Pros manage backup? What form of media they use and what configuration?
Should i order to nas storages and make one clone the other? I have absolutely no knowledge how ill manage that with a single lan port on my airport express!
Or can u link me to a good read online? Something that clears my mind about this subject?
How do u manage backup?

Sorry to hear of your predicament. Here on tips on maintaining a "fool proof" restore and disaster recovery system. I talk about restore systems, not backup systems. The goal is restoring the data when needed with minimum loss. The philosophy is defense in depth.
For an in-depth teatment on this topic see PlotinusVeritas' excellent dissertation on this subject:
Ideal philosophy and security of your valuable data
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6031
"Pros" maintain multiple backups, not just one, and not just two. The external media is cheap and the data is highly valluable so the equation is simple. You want multiple backups. You store only backup data on a backup volume.
You want to store at least one restore volume not in the same building as your Mac. This is for a marjor disaster recovery such as fire, flood, theft…
You also want to maintain the backups in two different formats: Time Machine backups and clone backups.
The beauty of Time Machine backups is they are easy to keep up to date and they are useful for going back into time for accidentally deleted or corrupted files. It will also backup multiple volumes (such as the internal disk/SSD and an external disk) as long as the restore volume is big enough to hold the data in use.
The downside of TM is its complexity. I have had TM restores fail and I was very glad I had a second copy.
The beauty of clones are their simplicity and immediate recovery. You can create clones with several software systems (including Disk Utility) but I prefer an inexpensive software system called Carbon Copy Clone. PlotinusVeritas introduced me to this recovery system recently in these Community postings and love it.
CCC will make a bootable copy of your internal disk. You get one copy as of the latest backup so you cannot go back in time but instead you have a very simple method to recover your data. For example if you have an internal disk (as opposed to an SSD) you simply replace your internal drive with the cloned drive and you are up and running immediately You can also plug it in as an external drive and boot from it immediately. It is less error prone than TM. The first time you run it, it does a full backup. In subsequent runs it copies over only files that have changes so it is a quick backup.
The downside of CCC is you usually run it manually. You can keep a clone disk plugged in and CCC will maintain a schedule when to backup (such as nightly).
So for a reasonably complete system you would have four backups: One TM and one CCC backup onsite and the one TM and one CCC backup offsite. Then occasionally swap the onsite and offsite disks to keep the offsite disks reasonably current.
When it is time to restore you have a choice. The TM backup will probably be more up to date than the CCC backup. So I usually start with a TM restore and if that does not work fall back to the CCC volume. If my CCC restore volume were reasonably current I would start with that. Others who don't trust TM as much as CCC and don't mind losing the updates that happened between the latests TM and CCC backups use the simpler and more immediate CCC restore. I start with a ™ restore with CCC as my fallback position.
May you recover your photos and then back them up with defense in depth.

How to Schedule a Backup in db2

Hi, Experts
We are using ECC6 (OS400 with DB2). i want to schedule a backup in db13 but system throwing error iSeries : Function not supported for DB2/400
Please tell me how to schedule a backup
Thanks & Regards
Venkat

Hi,
In Application(SAP) level you can't able to take Backup.
You can take backup from OS level.
GO SAVE command and schedule the backup...R3<SID>DATA and R3<SID>JRN...libraries you can take daily..
Monthly once you cane take Entire System Backup with offline.
If you want online backup you came go to BRMS..But it is licence product with IBM.
Thanks
Jibin.

How do I find out how big a file size is in itunes before I buy it?

I'm trying to work out how many of the tv episodes in a series I can actually fit on my iphone as i'm running out of space but can't seem to find anywhere in itunes telling me how big either the whole download is or individual episodes. Any help greatly appreciated!

Thank you for replying I cant see it though (I must be being stupid!!)
All it says is:
SD version
Genre: scifi
Released: 22 September 2009
@ CBS Corp 2011
No file size?

Do not know how big or small items in image will be after being printed out

I have just started using photoshop to develop some designs that are meant to be printed on fabric. And then sewn into dresses
While I know how to change the size and scale of the image and canvas. I can not tell how big or small the objects or different elements in the pattern will be when printed out.
For example if I want to have a certain part of the pattern appear on the shoulder of a dress and another on the hem, how do I ensure that they are printed at the right size and in the right place.
I tried printing out one pattern on a meter of fabric and it turn out that it was too big and most of the design will be cut in the process of making the dress. I have no way to determine the dimensions.
Is there a way where I can place a dress outline over an image to check it out or size the individual items inside?
Thank you

can place a dress outline over an image to check it out or size the individual items inside?
Do you have the cut in digital form (vector or pixels)?

How big is my backup?

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