How much room does Time Machine take

I have a Macbook Pro with 120GB HD. I wanted to know how big of an external HD I need for Time Machine. I also want to know if I can use it as a HD for large files (imovies) and have that separate from the Time Machine application.

You can put files on the TM drive, but sooner or later you wont be able to. Time Machine will use up as much space as you give it, so regardless of the size of the drive you connect, sooner or later Time Machine will fill it up with backup information. The time it takes to do this will depend on the size of the files you use and how often you edit them. Basically, the larger the drive the better, but it all depends on the two factors: file size and frequency of editing. When Time Machine fills up the drive, it will delete the oldest backups and replace them with new ones dynamically, keeping the drive full but updated with the most recent content. Unfortunately this will mean you wont have any space to put other files on the drive. If you have files on the drive, time machine will fill up the drive around those files and when you delete them, time machine will use up that new space. Basically this means the free space on the Time Machine drive is a temporary thing that will only get smaller and smaller until it will be nonexistant. The best solution for this is to partition the drive into two volumes, and use one for TM and the other for regular disk space (the problem with this is knowing how much to designate to each volume).
I think Apple should put in limits for Time Machins so it only uses a given number of MB/GB on a given drive, and also make it so the Time Machine backups can be dynamically reduced in size by deleting the oldest backups until the database size is reduced to the desired number of GB. I've given feedback to apple about this, and I suggest others do the same. As it currently is, your Time Machine partition is reserved by the system for one purpose only, and other uses for that partition are temporary and limited.

Similar Messages

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    Can anyone let me know how much hard drive space time machine takes up?

    Hi, and welcome to the forums.
    Time Machine keeps copies of everything on your system (except a few things like system work files, most caches and logs, and trash), so the first backup will be a bit smaller than the amount of data on your system.
    Subsequent backups will copy things you've added or changed, but doesn't delete the copies of the old versions, or of things you've deleted, so you can restore them if you find you've deleted or changed something in error, or something has gotten corrupted. Thus Time Machine will need considerably more space. IIn most cases, it won't delete it's copies until it runs out of room.
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    You might want to review the [Time Machine Tutorial|http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/#timemachinebasics] and perhaps browse [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of the +Time Machine+ forum).

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    My computer's hard drive is 100 GB, so I created a 100 GB partition on my external hard drive for Time Machine, before I really understood how it worked. Of course, I eventually got a message saying it was out of room. If I understand correctly, Time Machine will continue to back up changed files, but it can no longer maintain a complete series. Rather, it will be forced to delete older backups to make room for newer.
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    I'm thinking of reformatting my 500 GB external hard drive into five partitions...
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    I still don't see a tremendous need for Time Machine, as I very, very seldom go searching for lost files. However, I suspect there may be occasions when it might come in handy.
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    Really depends how much stuff you do, how many files you change each day, how much stuff lands on your computer for a few days then is deleted (for example I have several GB of photos on my Mac for a few days until I do some work on them and drop them on the company server, so I have lots of stuff getting backed up into Time Machine that doesn't even stay on my Mac)... It doesn't hurt to have a backup of them locally in case something goes wrong on the company server...
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    Thanks Kappy and Tech Guy. I'll try and digest that info--it may take awhile!
    Just for info, I am using a Lacie d2 500 GB, presently it has used 263 of the 500.
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  • How much space on Time machine?

    Okay, so I'm totally new to this, and don't know much about anything.
    How do I check how much space I have left on my time Machine?
    Had a PC before, where I just went to 'My Computer' then checked whichever drive I wanted to check space on. Is there a similar way to check this on the time machine?

    Gems_ca wrote:
    Okay, so I'm totally new to this, and don't know much about anything.
    How do I check how much space I have left on my time Machine?
    Had a PC before, where I just went to 'My Computer' then checked whichever drive I wanted to check space on. Is there a similar way to check this on the time machine?
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    You will get all the information about the drive you need.

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    peteratomic wrote:
    Just using Time Machine for the first time today. It's been running for nearly four and half hours, only displaying "Indexing backup..." with no progress indication at all. Does it really take this monumentally long the first time you use it?
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