Limit Time Machine

Hi, i know there are alot of unsolved topics of this, but my situation is a bit different. On 10.5 I was able to limit the space using quotas, I even wrote down the steps so i wouldn't forget. What i did...
1.- Enable quotas on the disk
2.- Share and add R&W access to the user
3.- run edquota on that user (workgroup manager quota didn't seem to do anything). Set the hard quota to something (in the test i did i set it to 33GB just to fill it up fast just to see if it was working)
After that, on the client side, i selected the disk and it said the disk size was 33GB, used it for a while copying new files to the client and backing up until i got a disk full)
So that worked as expected.
I upgraded to 10.6, did the same but now Time Machine is reporting 16TB (size of the volume). Now another test on 10.6 I did was set the quota to something small and filled it up with random files, for the last bit i did a little bash script to write characters to a file until my quota was caped. Now i was left with 0 space left.
After that i went to time machine and tried to backup and it failed.
So the quota worked even for the time machine files, but the server is reporting the volume size and not the size of the quota as it did on 10.5.
Did something change, did i completely miss something . I saw this working, that just makes it that much more frustrating.
Message was edited by: geermc4

Solved.
This is what i had
Quotas for user me:
/Volumes/Drobo: 1K blocks in use: 768224, limits (soft = 0, hard = 367001600)
inodes in use: 321, limits (soft = 0, hard = 0)
This is what i should have done
/Volumes/Drobo: 1K blocks in use: 768224, limits (soft = 0, hard = 367001600)
inodes in use: 321, limits (soft = 0, hard = 367001600)
Edit. that's on edquota btw.
Message was edited by: geermc4

Similar Messages

Limit Time Machine backup/sparsebundle so one machine doesn't hog all the time capsule space?

Is this possible?
I have a brand new time capsule, my wife and I will be backing up our computers to it using Time Machine. Is it possible to limit the storage size of the sparsebundles so one of us (probably me) wont hog all the space?
My wife doesn't use her's as much, while my computer is on almost everyday, so I'm affraid my computer will limit the amount of states, or versions, that she can back up before her time machine has to start deleting old files.
I'm trying to avoid a situation where my time machine goes back a year while her's only goes back a few months.
Thanks!

No. That is not how a Time Capsule and Time Machine work. All backups are adding to existing backups.
About TM "Backup Drive is Full"
Alert TM only deletes older files if they have been deleted from the source and when TM needs space on the backup drive for a new incremental backup. Time Machine "thins" it's backups; hourly backups over 24 hours old, except the first of the day; those "daily" backups over 30 days old, except the first of the week. The weeklies are kept as long as there's room.
So, how long a backup file remains depends on how long it was on your Mac before being deleted, assuming you do at least one backup per day. If it was there for at least 24 hours, it will be kept for at least a month. If it was there for at least a week, it will be kept as long as there's room.
Note, that on a Time Capsule the sparsebundle grows in size as needed, but doesn't shrink. Thus, from the user's view of the TC it appears that no space has been freed, although there may be space in the sparsebundle.
Once TM has found it cannot free up enough space for a new backup it reports the disk is full. You can either erase the backup drive and start your backups anew or replace the drive with a larger drive.
To accomplish what you want would mean using just an external backup drive partitioned with volumes for each of you to use, and the use of a different backup utility that overwrites old files rather than saving them as does Time Machine.

Limit Time Machine Disc Space

I am using an external NAS for backup. I backup up a few computers to the array. The array only has one volume right now. After a lot of reading it doesn't seem like you can limit disc space with time machine. Is there a way to limit the disc space TM uses vs. consume the full drive then delete old files? I would prefer not to drop the volume and partion the discs if possible. Any other options?
Thanks for any assistance.

Not a good choice because the Time Machine backup drive needs to have much more space than the size of the hard drive you backup. If you need storage space, then buy another drive to use.

Limit Time Machine Backups Folder Size?

It there a way to limit the size of the Time Machine backups folder? I have 100GB of data on my MacBook's drive that TM is backing up to a 500GB external drive. In 18 months the backups folder has grown to 375GB. I'd prefer not to have to get another drive in 6 months, so can I put a limit on this somehow?

Roast Beef wrote:
It there a way to limit the size of the Time Machine backups folder? I have 100GB of data on my MacBook's drive that TM is backing up to a 500GB external drive. In 18 months the backups folder has grown to 375GB. I'd prefer not to have to get another drive in 6 months, so can I put a limit on this somehow?
That's exactly how TM is designed. It will use all the space assigned to it for backups.
You won't have to get a new drive in 6 months. Just un-check the +Warn when old backups are deleted+ box in TM Preferences > Options, and when the disk gets almost full, TM will automatically delete your oldest backups to make room for new ones.
Or, if you want to use part of that drive for other things, you can make a second partition for the other data. See item #6 of the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip* at the top of this forum. It tells you how to add a TM partition to a disk that already has data on it, but the procedure is the same.
Just don't put important data on that other partition without backing it up some other way.

Limit Time Machine Disk Usage (Drobo)

Is it possible to set a software limit on the amount of disk space used by Time Machine?
I have a Drobo device which is currently working very well with Time Machine. However, there is a small feature which I can see becoming a problem.
The Drobo reports itself to OSX as a 2TB device which allows me to add and remove hard drives without having to reformat the volume. But, I only actually have 4 250GB drives which gives me just over 650GB of usable space once the device has done it's "RAID like" configuration of the data.
Even if I were to max out the drobo with 500GB drives, I would still only have 1.5TB of useable space once the redundancy is taken into account.
So, is there some Time Machine option I can use to limit the space it uses to something like 300GB?

Well, not in Time Machine, but using Disk Utility in leopard you could create a 300 gig partition without erasing any of the data on the drive (the new Disk Utility allows for non-destructive re-partitioning).

Limiting Time Machine backup Size with WD MyBookLive and 10.8

I cannot take credit for the any part of this solution; merely for merging and clarifying how the solutions discovered by 2 Apple Support Communities contributors much smarter than I (namely “Pondini” – Florida and “himynameismarek”) - worked perfectly for my situation. All cudo’s to these two!
I have about average or better PC skills, but am an absolute newbie with Apple. This week I got a new iMac. Having a number of home PC’s all sharing files and back up space on a Western Digital MyBookLive (“WD MBL”) 3TB network drive (NAS), naturally I wanted to use it to backup the new Mac rather than rushing out to buy an Apple Time Capsule.
There are hundreds of threads on limiting size of a Time Machine (“TM”) backup, many of which required entries in “Terminal” or were devised on older versions of OSX. I’m running OSX Mountain Lion 10.8, so was concerned they may not work.
The issues I wanted to resolve were:
Time Machine will use up all of the space on my WD MBL if left to it’s own devices.
The WD MBL is compatible with Mac and PC’s… which is good… but unlike a back up in Windows 7 Pro which will allow you to make backups in a mapped “share” you create yourself, Apple TM Backups will not; they end up in a hidden folder on the NAS (much like PC backups done with WD Smartware)
At first I thought maybe I could limit the size of a share created in the MBL, but not possible, at least not that I've seen and I have searched for days.
The solutions:
First make sure you have the latest firmware for the WD MBL as of today it is MyBookLive 02.11.09-053. From what I’ve read Western Digital fixed the compatibility issues with 10.8 Mountain Lion just recently.
Next you need to start TM so that it starts to create a back up. You can stop the back up once you see files being copied. Do this before you walk thru the video tutorial by my Marek below. WD MBL will create the hidden folder you need to find for TM Backups. This folder is called “TimeMachine” but it is not visible even in the “MBL_NAME-backup” folder in Finder.
Open safari and type “ afp://xxx.xxx.x.xxx ” but use your own ip address of your MBL. Mine was 192.168.1.120, yours will be different.
It will ask how you want to connect. CHOOSE AS A GUEST even if your MBL is protected… I’m not sure why it works but it does. Then a window will come up asking which share you’d like to mount. You will see all of your own shares plus one called software and now one called “TimeMachine”. Choose that one.
Now in “Finder” you will see a mounted shared item called “YOUR_MBL_NAME-“ (the same as the one that is probably already there but with a dash(-) at the end). You’ll also see a new “device” in the device list called “Time Machine Backups” (If you already have watched the video tutorial by Marek, you’d know you are looking for a file called “YOUR_MACHINE_NAME.sparsebundle”. Well if you browse the folder “Backups.backupdb” in the Time Machine Backups device you won’t find it… again I don’t know why but you won’t. It resides in the hidden folder called “TimeMachine” that is now visible in the thing you just mounted in step 4)
NOW watch this video tutorial http://youtu.be/Nq7mSizqUSI and follow it step by step.
Voila... issues resolved. Thank you Pondini and Marek!

Try Use Terminal to limit Time Machine sparcebundle size on timecapsule,
should work to limit Time Machine backup size on any NAS or external disk (or not...)
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine MaxSize 500000
to return to ilimited
sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine MaxSize
if you want to reclame deleted files space shrink it use
hdiutil resize -size 500g -shrinkonly /Volumes/TimeMachineYOURNAME/YOURNAME.sparsebundle/
Regards

How to Stop Time Machine before Disk is Full

In the System Preferences, Time Machine will keep weekly backups "until your backup disk is full". I also use the backup disk for other storage purposes, so is there a way to stop Time Machine perhaps when the disk is 90% full or has 10 gigs left?
Does anyone know a command line trick or option to adjust this setting to backup "until your backup disk is nearly full"? I'd prefer a way to limit Time Machine from taking over the entire disk.

OK then - Create a file A on the disk that represents 10% of the disk space. When the disk fills you can then remove the file A and deal with disk full conditions as you wish.
You can create a file easily in terminal.app. Use the mkfile command.
Let's say you disk with Volume name "Big" is 300 GB in size.
In Terminal enter
cd /Volumes/Big
mkfile 30g TempFile
This will create a 30 GB file with a pathname of /Volumes/Big/TempFile
This is somewhat of a kludge but it's simple.

HT201250 Is Time Machine Scalable?

I have a MBA with about 150GB of files and a TIme Capsule. It looks like this is too much for Time Machine to handle. The initial backup takes 2 days and the hourly backups take more than an hour. While the backup processes are running my MBA occasionally becomes unresponsive for a minute at a time. This means that if I keep automatic backups enabled it is difficult to use the computer because of all the interruptions. When I turn off automatic backups and only manually backup files Time Machine periodically tries to perform a complete backup which takes 2 solid days.
I did some digging to see how Time Machine works. It looks like Time Machine mounts the remote drive and performs all comparisons as a local file system operation. This means that to check which files have changed Time Machine has to read information about every file on the remote disk across the network. During this operation Activity Monitor shows that my wireless network is saturated--note that I have an Air which does not have an ethernet port. This appears to limit Time Machine's/Capsule's scalability.
I have been digging around to see if I can make this purchase useful, but it does not apear that there are very many tuning options with Time Machine. Any suggestions are welcome. Otherwise I will have to return my Time Capsule and look for a more scalable solution. Any recommendations for alternatives would be welcomed as well.

Question? Do you have a Virtual Machine running on your Mac (VMware Fusion, Parallels, VirtualBox) with a guest OS installed? Any changes made by a guest OS in their container file will result in the entire file being backed up. This can increase the backup time a great deal. The same effect will occur if you have any very large file that is always changing, such as a huge log file that has items appended to its tail end on a regular bases.
With respect to scheduling, there are utilities available to change the scheduling anyway you wish. Search over at MacUpdate.com
Regarding the relative efficiency for Time Machine versus rsync, there is no comparison between the two. Rsync is hands down more efficient in terms of CPU and network usage.
A well working Time Machine WILL be more efficient that rsync (and I am a heavy rsync user, as well as a Unix file system developer during the day). Time Machine uses Spotlight to keep track of changed files, so that when it is time to do a backup Time Machine does not need to look for changed files, it has a list handed to it from Spotlight.
Rsync needs to scan the entire file system on BOTH the source AND destination system reading every file's metadata to get the modification date and compare that between the source and destination system. That in and of itself is very demanding on the disk drives of BOTH source and destination systems.
I use rsync to backup my Mom's system across the internet, I use rsync to backup several systems at work, I rsync to transfer software trees to build servers, I use rsync to keep my personal scripts and utilities in sync on multiple systems. Rsync is great, however, it is not as efficient, and most definitely not as easy to use as Time Machine.
So if you are having problems, there is something else going on, as most users do not experience what you are seeing. Including me, as I also use Time Machine on several systems.
For example, as mentioned above, huge files that get modified on a regular bases.
Since you are going over a network, it is possible you have network interference that is reducing your effective trasnfer speeds. Using 802.11g vs 802.11n w/5GHz frequences. A network sniffer (iStumbler, KISMac, ...) would be able to tell you if you have neighbors using the same channels, or a channel that is within 5 of yours that might be causing interference.
As for shutting down vs sleeping your Mac, I do not know if that would or should affect your Time Machine backup performance. I would be looking at other things.
However, I might speculate that maybe Mac OS X thinks your Time Machine container file stored on the Time Capsule is damaged, so its is running 'fsck' when Time Machine mounts the volume. This would consume a great deal of time. You could run Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor and see if there is an fsck_hfs program running while your excessively long Time Machine backup is in progress.
Finally, if you prefer rsync, you can always just use the Time Capsule as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) and backup using rsync from your Mac to the Time Capsule. You could even use Carbon Copy Cloner which is a very nice GUI wrapped around rsync, and as a bonus the CCC developer always ships the most recent Mac OS X compatible rsync as part of the CCC distribution. If you want rsync AND you want the multiple generation incremental Time Machine backup features, you can either roll your own using the rsync --link-dest option, or find one of the Unix scripts, such as rsnapshot (or similar) that wrap a script around rsync --link-dest (almost as good as a Time Machine incremental backup).
Bottom line. You have a problem. It is specific to your situation. I have listed several possible reasons for what you are seeing, there could be more. If you could provide feedback on some of the things I've mentioned, maybe we could help figure out what is going on.

Limiting Time Machine backup size onto external drive

I have a 6TB RAID LaCie external drive that I would like to use with Time Machine. My mac has a 1TB HD which is not full. I do not want Time Machine to fill up my external drive with multiple backups. Is there some way to limit how much space Time Machine will use on an external drive? My understanding is that Time Machine will fill up the drive completely, then start overwriting the oldest files.
I do not think that I could partition the drive. But I am not sure how to do that, if it works with mac, and if I can do it now without reformating the drives. I am looking to see if there is a solution on the Time Machine software side.

Try Use Terminal to limit Time Machine sparcebundle size on timecapsule,
should work to limit Time Machine backup size on any NAS or external disk (or not...)
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine MaxSize500000
to return to ilimited
sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine MaxSize
if you want to reclame deleted files space shrink it use
hdiutil resize -size 500g -shrinkonly /Volumes/TimeMachineYOURNAME/YOURNAME.sparsebundle/
Regards

How do i increase capacity in my basic memory when i have unused memory in my time machine backup??

how do i increase capacity in my basic memory when i have unused memory in my time machine backup?

No. The Time Machine backup size will increase as you use the source machine. When it nears its volume's capacity limit Time Machine will automatically delete old backups according to its algorithm. Just let it work.

How do I limit the amount of space Time Machine uses?

Right, so the drive I was using for Time Machine had a most lovely volume failure. Somehow, I managed to fix it. The drive itself is fine but I find this all out after I buy a Drobo to replace it with (plenty of other of reasons for buying it, so it's OK).
Anyway, I've transitioned all of my files onto the Drobo and now want to use part of it for Time Machine. However, there's a snag. There are only two ways I know to do this:
1. Partition part of the drive and tell Time Machine to use that. Would work except the guys behind the Drobo specifically say "Don't use your Drobo with Disk Utility. It'll just mess thing sup." So partitioning is out of the question.
2. Time Tamer, a handy little script that does some magic and gives me a Sparse Bundle to use for Time Machine that is twice the size of my internal drive. That would work great. Except I only want it to be 1 TB instead of 2 TBs. I never even come close to filling the drive itself and the last Time Machine backup I had was only 1 TB and I had yet to even fill that after... Oh... Six months or so.
I'm sure there's a way for me to do number two manually but I have no idea how. I'd really apprecaite it if someone could point me in the right direction. Google isn't helping.

You cannot limit what TM uses on the drive. You can partition the drive and assign a specific partition as the TM backup drive. If you do this then be sure that partition is at least twice the capacity of the drive it backs up.
You don't pre-size a sparsebundle. It simply expands or contracts as needed. Given sufficient time TM will fill up any drive.
If your Drobo consists of RAIDed drives, then you cannot partition it. If it comes as two separate drives, then use one for backup.

How to limit the amount of disk space Time Machine will use?

On Yosemite, how do you limit the amount of disk space Time Machine will use?
I'm using a Seagate Goflex Home 2tb drive connected to my router as a Time Machine backup drive. I use this for three things 1)Time Machine 2) an occasional backup of windows document subdirectory 3) backup of music and photos for long term storage. Doing something like re-partioning the drive is not an option. I'll just go buy another drive for time machine's sole use. In addition, using software from Seagate is not an option. I don't want to use their software for different reasons (mainly the GoFlex home is really designed as a "media server" which I don't use. I, of course, use iTunes. ) On the Mac, I'm only using about 250GB total but time machine is rapidly using up space.
Apparently using a terminal command like below, used to work, but no longer works under Yosemite.
For a limit of 100gb the number below would be 100 x 1024
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine MaxSize 102400
To remove the limit, use the following command:
sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine MaxSize
Now, I'm not too familiar with terminal and I'm not about ready to issue a command without knowing exactly what it is going to do.
Is there an easier "switch" someplace or an app that does this?
If I don't limit the size, at some point there will not be any space left for windows backups and additional photo and music files.

Hmm- added "sudo" and there was no error reported:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine MaxSize xxxxxx
I guess we'll see.

HT201250 Is there a size limit for an external drive to be used with time machine?

I have an iMac with a 2TB drive. I have a 2TB WD drive used for Time Machine that is full. I would like to go to the bigest WD (type) external drive that will work with Time Machine. Is there a TB limit for TM in OS X Lion?

Welcome . I have also used a 2TB WD My Book ext HDD for Time Machine backups for the past year and have had no problems. They seem to get a very bad wrap. Perhaps we are a few of the lucky ones. The two brands recommended by macjack are very, very good brands.

How can I limit the amount of space on a Time Capsule used by Time Machine?

I know that you cannot partition a Time Capsule drive. However, I was wondering about other options for limiting the amount of space used by Time Machine so that I can use the rest of the space for other purposes.
I heard something about creating a disk image on the Time Capsule to limit the amount of space used by Time Machine. If I create a disk image, would TM just use all the space that's not part of the disk image? How do I access the disk image part? Can I manually drag and drop files to it from my Mac like any other external drive? Could I set up the disk image part to work with a Windows computer?
I've also heard things about modifying sparsebundles which I don't know anything about. How does this work? What happens to the space that is not part of the TM sparsebundle? How do I access it? Can I manually drag and drop files to it from my Mac like any other external drive? Could I set up the extra space to work with a Windows computer?

Some other things to make note of:
Some disk image formats have a maximum size and only use that size after they have had to expand to actually hold that much data. Make sure you are not using this type of image so you can guarantee the space is reserved. Sparse bundles are like this. I haven't read up on the sparse bundle trick, but I assume it's something to do with setting a maximum size for it.
When you open up the Time Capsule disk, you will first be looking at the normal storage space. When you create an image, there will be a file you click on that mounts another drive that uses space on the Time Capsule. This shows up as just one file unless you open it to see it's contents.

Time Capsule: How can one limit size of Time Machine Backup?

So there appears to be no easy way of partitioning the hard drive in Time Capsule. If this is so how does one limit the size of the Time Machine backups folders?
I want to use the hard drive to act as a normal storage device for various files but I understand that Time Machine will keep on increasing the size of the backups folder until it eventually runs out of space on the hard drive partition. Since one cannot re-partition the hard drive how can Time Machine be allotted only a specific portion of the hard drive? I don't want the hard drive to be filled with Time Machine backup folders.

Thanks BSP. Yes I am aware of the ability to limit the folders that TM backs up. I use this capability, But that certainly is not the solution I want.
I have not bought Time Capsule and probably will not buy it unless Apple fix this 'problem' and make the hard drive in TC behave like any other hard drive.
Why is it that Apple comes up with innovative designs which are let down by being 'crippled' in some way? Apple TV is another good example; can you steam from DVD Player? No. Can one steam a presentation directly from Keynote? No. With a little more thought Apple's products would be great. But, alas, this is not the case.

Limit Time Machine

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