How large External HD for Time Machine?

Hello, everyone! Yes, after decades of being in PC-Hades, I have joined the "Dark Side" as my former PC friends have joked about lately. I have a new iMac, 1TB drive with a 27" window to the world attached and I am in **** with Macs now. What took me so long???
I've had the machine three weeks now and am starting to use it for my personal business and now have a strong need to start using TM for routine backups of invoices, bills and the likes.
I apologize for being so wordy but here is my question, one I have not seen asked here lately or been able to find for myself.
Is it really necessary to purchase a 2 TB drive for TM to use as a backup (as I was advised to do in the Apple Store today)? What I am trying to protect wouldn't fill that much space in a century of use. Is it possible to buy, say, a 1 TB drive and partition a third or a half of it for TM and leave the rest for music or home shot videos so as not to clutter up the new internal HD?
Or should I just go back to my old habits of backing up critical files (maybe 30-50 kb, one page bills/invoices/etc) and just use a small thumb drive instead and do the old drag and drop? I like the idea of 'automatic' backups but I don't quite understand the reasoning for having a backup drive the exact same size as my internal HD.
Any advice would be very welcome.
Thank you very much!
pat

JG!
Whew, am I blushing! I totally missed the FAQ-I just came to the forums and started searching for the answer and just blew by the FAQ. My aplogies. Thanks for directing me that way. I appreciate it.
pat

Similar Messages

I've used an external drive for time machine which has important files on it. After trying to back up my computer, it suddenly needed to be "repaired" by utilities. Now it's not being "seen" at all! How do I recover my important files off the drive?

I've used an external drive for time machine which has important files on it. After trying to back up my computer, it suddenly needed to be "repaired" by utilities. Now it's not being "seen" at all! How do I recover my important files off the drive?

If the external drive can be seen at all in Disk Utility, follow the instructions for repair here.

My 320GB external drive for Time Machine now only has enough capacity to keep a backup of one day. All my other backups are gone. What can I do to fix this situation?

I've been using a 320GB external drive for time machine for the last several years. The backups always worked fine and when necessary I was able to look at & restore older data from the time capsule. Recently, I keep getting the message that a backup cannot be completed and an older backup will be deleted. Usually this wasn't an issue because I still had several months of information on disk. Now a one-time backup takes up 315GB and therefore I only have a backup of the previous day. I don't understand this because I thought that the backup only saves information that has changed and doesn't copy everything everytime. What do I need to do to get my backups to a reasonable size so that I can keep at least 1 month data stored on it.? Please don't tell me I need a larger drive ... that would be too easy.

Get a larger drive for your TM backups.
The recommended size is 3 times what you are backup. So if 315 GB is a backup then you need a 1 TB drive.
Allan

HT3275 New macbook, old external drive for time machine

I got a new macbook pro a few weeks ago and set it up using my last backup from time machine. I want to use the same external drive for backups but there is no room. Can I delete all of the old files from the old computer or do I need to keep them?

kat.hayes wrote:
I want to use a 3 TB external drive for Time Machine to backup multiple 500GB hard drives in my Macpro. I have lots of large video files from HD cameras.
1. Will Time Machine backup all of the hard drives in the Macpro?
As long as they're formatted HFS+, yes. Be sure there's enough room, though -- Time Machine needs considerably more room than the data it's backing-up. See #1 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.

External drive for Time Machine

I want to use a 3 TB external drive for Time Machine to backup multiple 500GB hard drives in my Macpro. I have lots of large video files from HD cameras.
1. Will Time Machine backup all of the hard drives in the Macpro?
2. What is a good external hard drive to handles these types of files?
Thanks.

kat.hayes wrote:
I want to use a 3 TB external drive for Time Machine to backup multiple 500GB hard drives in my Macpro. I have lots of large video files from HD cameras.
1. Will Time Machine backup all of the hard drives in the Macpro?
As long as they're formatted HFS+, yes. Be sure there's enough room, though -- Time Machine needs considerably more room than the data it's backing-up. See #1 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.

Looking at external HD for Time machine backup and for XP OS?

Bought a 24" iMac desktop with a 500 GB HD and am going to be running up to Best Buy to snag a Western Digital external My Book 750 GB HD. Mainly this external is for Time Machine backup, photos, iTunes library, etc. but I'd like to fire up boot camp and install Windows XP OS. Question is, can I install the XP OS on the external HD so I don't have to divide and possibly mess up my internal Mac HD? Also, when I do install XP OS, how much space for a partition? XP will be mainly for just a few PC games that are PC only like Company of Heroes.

Hi Saius,
yeah, the more the better...
BootCamp requires the use of XP with SP2. Without SP2 (SP1 or earlier) it either does not install or if installed can produce some odd errors.
If you have access to a Windows XP PC you can try these instructions to slipstream the SP2 together with your 'old' XP CD to a new XP SP2 CD.
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxpsp2slipstream.asp
Before spending some unneccessary dollars might be worth trying.
It's not very difficult to do this (done it myself some years back).
Also it is a good idea to use your external HD and make a bootable clone of your OSX volume using either SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner.
That way in case something goes wrong, you can easily revert back.
Personally I would not use Time Machine for that task.
Have Fun and thanks for the star.
Stefan

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.

Brand new iMac 23.GHz Intel Core i5. Mounts external drive for time machine, then dismounts after backup is complete.

brand new iMac 23.GHz Intel Core i5. Mounts external drive for time machine, then dismounts after backup is complete.

The warranty entitles you to complimentary phone support for the first 90 days of ownership.
If you bought the product in the U.S. directly from Apple (not from a reseller), you have 14 days from the date of delivery in which to exchange or return it for a refund. In other countries, the return policy may be different. If you bought from a reseller, its return policy applies.

Recommendation for Large (4Tb) External Drive for Time Machine

I have a large library that I'd like to backup from my Mac Pro - 2T drives are not large enough - any recommendations on 4T drives for Time Machine?
Thanks
GJM

People have said to wait for version 8.2 of Retrospect which appears to be here.
http://www.retrospect.com/
Maybe time to move to RAID6 controller. I've seen folks on MacGurus talk about large, massive storage arrays and backups.
http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/BurlyRAID.php
People have said that they backup RAID A to B. Or mirror two arrays.
Did you not like SynchronizePro? From March '09:
After months of trying and testing we have settled on Areca cards.
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=9218286#9218286
I have not heard of problems (very many) with SuperDuper and their support is always helpful.
A linux NAS server running linux backup or even Windows Home Server. People even use Windows to run Retrospect (runs better). Anything you find will likely take some time to setup and configure in the beginning, this isn't your proconsumer type of need.

How can I make more room on external drive for Time Machine?

I now have Time Machine installed and in use on my external drive, which also still has my previous backup on it which used a different system (Dejavu). The external drive's capacity is 74 GB; 58.22GB are used, my iMac hard drive (backed up with TIme Machine) has 38.12 GB used, which by my calculation means about 20GB of the 58 on the external drive are the prior backup. Is there a way I can erase this prior backup, which now duplicates Time Machine, thereby making more room for Time Machine in the future? For instance, if need be, can I erase the whole thing and reinstall Time Machine on it? Thanks!

James, if you open your TM drive, I'm guessing you see the usual System, Library, Users, and Applications folder along with a folder labeled something like Backup.bkup. (I'm away from a TM backup and I can't exactly recall the name of the TM backup folder.)
The DejaVu backup is just a standard file backup using 'rsync' so you can delete whatever you want by simply dragging it to the trash and emptying the trash. If the drive is bootable, you may not want to lose that ability. But assuming there's nothing in your user folder on that backup that isn't also on your computer, you can delete just about everything in your User folder on that drive. You can delete selected applications too. And if you don't mind losing the ability to boot, you can drag everything but the TM backup folder.

Can I use an external drive for Time Machine and storing other data?

At the moment I have one external drive, a 500gb LaCie. My internal drive is 160gb. I don't think I'll be using all 500 of those gigabytes for a while, so I want to put them to good use. Can I make a partition on this drive and use that for Time Machine, leaving the rest of the drive for my documents and other files? If so, how would I partition the drive? I'm not fluent in Disk Utility and even though I'm pretty sure I know how to do it, I don't want to screw up. Also, how big a partition would you recommend?
While we're here, I have a second question, somewhat relevant to the first. Could I move my Time Machine backups to a second drive if I wanted to? Also, if I used a big drive (say 1tb) could I use Time Machine to backup my current LaCie to a partition on that drive? Thanks in advance.

videoCWK wrote:
Does that also mean that I could back them both up on a very big drive?
Yes. Time Machine will, by default, back up all of your external drives unless you specifically exclude them.
Also, will Time Machine backups eat all my space after a lot of usage?
It depends on what you do on your Mac. If you work often with very large files (video editing, heavy photo editing, big disk images, Microsoft Entourage data file, Parallels disk image file, etc) then your backup drive could fill up very quickly.
I use my Mac mostly for e-mail, web browsing, iTunes, iPhoto, and the occasional iMovie project. I have 92 GB on my main hard drive (60 GB of which are my iTunes and iPhoto libraries, and one iMovie project.) My Time Machine backups consume 155GB on my backup drive, and that's after using Time Machine for a full year.

External drive for Time Machine and Firewire Hub

Just got a new iMac. My old iMac G5 was running 10.4.11 so no Time Machine. On the new iMac I am running 10.5.6 I find I have questions about how to go about making best use of this new facility available to me. Since my new iMac has only one firewire port (FW 800) I also need an additional port here.
My thoughts are to use an external drive connected with FW 800 as a Time Machine backup and use the (usually) extra FW 800 port to extend the FW 800 and I find I can get a dual interface drive with both FW 800 and FW 400, so I could use the FW 400 for FW 400 devices like other FW 400 drives and my video camera.
Currently I use SuperDuper to make clone backups of my HD on a weekly basis (I use 2 drives for this on a rotating basis). I plan to continue that in addition to the facility offered by Time Machine (on a separate drive).
My questions are...
Is it a good idea to use the extra FW 800 or 400 port on an external to connect other drives to use for clone BUs?
If that is a good idea...
What brand and size of drive to use for the Time Machine BU (FW 400/800 sharing)
A. Maxtor?
(I have several OneTouch II and OneTouch III that I use for clones, I have been using them for a few years without problem. I seem to remember reading about some problems with Maxtor, have I just been lucky?)
B. Newertech MiniStack v3 from OWC MacSales?
C. OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro™?
If the OWC Mercury Eltite is a good choice...
Is a 750 GB large enough?
Is it worth it to get the 1TB Enterprise 7200RPM?
Any other suggestions?
Andy

i needed 3 drives in total so went with my 2nd choice of buying external enclosures and then hard drives,
at the end it cost me much much less so i endded up buy another as a spare,
so currently using 4 NexStart combo enclosure each one fitted with a 500gb hard drive,
i got one connected to my G5 and 3 connected by FW400 to my imac through a daisy chain,
for time machines it doesnt matter about speed so you dont need to use up the FW800 Port,
FW400 will be fine,
before this i had a USB2 WD Book and was using that with time machine and never had a problem through USB,
i always connect to a port i hardly use as i wont ever need to keep taking it off if i had to connect my camera to it for example....

What size for External HD for Time Machine?

Hello. An Apple Support Tech suggested an external HD, twice the size of the internal for Time Machine backup. I presently have 1TB in the iMac and a 500GB Lacie--a long way from double! Do I need to rush out and get a 2TB one? Hope not due to the $$$!
Comments would be appreciated. Cheers.

A few additional points:
You can use Time Machine to back up more than just your internal drive. If you have a FireWire drive that is also primary storage, you can set Time Machine to back up both the internal drive and external FireWire drive. So be sure to include data on any other drive that you may want to also back up, when determining the required size of the Time Machine drive
You don't need to get a fast FireWire drive for use with Time Machine. A less expensive USB 2.0 drive works just fine. Capacity is more important than speed.
You don't have to use the entire external drive for the Time Machine backup. If you get one that is larger than currently needed, you can partition it and use one partition for Time Machine. You don't even have to partition it. The volume used by Time Machine can also be used to store other data.
You can exclude specific files and folders from being backed up. For example, if you use VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop, you may want to exclude the virtual hard disk image files used by the virtual machines. Those files are huge and every time you run the virtual machine, those disk image files change, and therefore, Time Machine will save another copy. That will chew through your available Time Machine backup space really fast. Also, you may feel like there is no need to backup files in your Downloads folder (because you can always download those files again), so you can exclude it. So be sure to consider things you don't need to backup, when figuring out how large your Time Machine backup drive should be.

Green Desktop Icon (for the external HD) for Time Machine

After I choosed my external Lacie HD as the BackUp Volume for Time Machine, the icon (on the Desktop) didn't change into the green (original) Time Machine Volume. How can I change that? Thanks a lot for your help, Beat.

I had a similar problem where my HD desktop icon originally changed to the green TM icon then reverted back to the original icon after I made some changes to TM preferences. To get the green TM icon back select the HD icon on your desktop and Get Info (Command-I). At the top of the Get Info dialog box next to the drive's name, click on the icon of the HD. It should have a light blue halo around it when selected. Once selected press the Delete key and the green TM HD icon should appear in place of the original HD icon.
That worked for me.

Formatting 1 TB External HD for Time Machine

Hi all -
This is my first post here. I just got a 1 TB Western Digital My Book Essential Edition external hard drive and now I'm formatting it. At least, I think I am. I'm not sure I'm doing it right. In Disk Utility it says "newfs_hfs: /dev/partition size not a multiple of 4k and the progress bar keeps moving along, but I can't tell if anything is actually happening. It also says the drive isn't mounted although I have it plugged into a USB port.
Please help me to understand what I'm doing, if I'm doing anything wrong, and if I am, how I can do it right. I bought this for the express purpose of backing up my entire system with Time Machine and I will be EXTREMELY upset if I've messed things up right from the start.
Thanks in advance for any and all helpful responses.
-- Jeff

I'm having the same problem with the 1TB WD My Book external HD on my MacBookPro running Leopard. The HD appears to come pre-formatted in FAT32, but I can't find any useful operations in Disk Utility to format it. There is no Partition tab. The drive appears to be verified as OK in FAT32 format, but Time Machine wants to reformat it ... when it tries, it fails immediately, leaving the drive name changed from MY BOOK to disk1s1. The erase tab is the only one which seems relevant, but if I try to set the format to Mac OS extended (journaled) as I understand it should be, it fails again, immediately, leaving an unreadable drive, which I have to erase again, setting it to FAT32, whereupon I;m back to square 1. Disk Utility seems a very lightweight utility, and I;m wondering if it ids properly installed, because this is really poor. I had the same problem with my Maxtor 500Gb external drive, which is why I bought the WD drive - solely for Time Machine, but I'm really struggling on this issue. I'm a new-to-mac user, btw. Can anyone help me - probably more step-by-step than you're used to! Thanks

How large External HD for Time Machine?

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