Multiple destination disks - Will Time Machine ever be able to write to

I have a lot of data (some video) so I want to have a couple TB's or more of backup. If Time Machine could backup over more then one device then I wouldn't have to worry about capacity so much. I could shuffle my drives and have more options for which drives are backup and which are current data.
Also if will Time Capsule ever be 2TB? It might be nice to have it stored in a security chest (prevent fire or theft) getting wireless data copied to it. I'm not sure what the max WiFi distance is or if that will work. Any thoughts?
Dave

TimeMachine will not work, unless, as suggested, you format the drives together to create a RAID array. However, this means that you need to have all the drives connected all at once. Essentially, RAID is like creating one big disk (volume) from several.
If I understand what you want to do, you want to fill up one disk, then disconnect it and put it on the shelf, then fill up another disk and so on.
There is backup software that works this way and it's called [Retrospect|http://www.emcinsignia.com/products/smb/retroformac>. I've used it to back up large (many terabytes) servers onto tape media (hundreds of DLT tape cassettes), but it will handle just about any kind of storage media. As one unit fills up, it will ask for another to add the incremental changes. You can either keep adding, or set up a rotation strategy where you erase and recycle your drives every so often. This process is handled well and can be automatic.
I haven't looked at Retrospect in several years so I can't say if it's still a good option, but I know it can do this so it might be worth looking into.

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Can I use multiple backup disks using time machine

I know I can back up multiple macs with TC and TM. but can I attach a TC and another hard drive (via a NAS) and have TM back up to both..... just for redundancy security.

Loaded question.
Some NAS drives will support Time Machine backups and some will not, so you would need to check with the drive manufacturer in advance to make sure that the drive you were interested in will work correctly.
Time Machine on one given Mac can only backup to one destination drive at a time.
You can change the destination drive(s), but you would have to do this manually in Time Machine Preferences.
Kind of clunky, but it would work if you remember to switch drives each day or week, etc.

I need to configure a new hard disk as backup disk for time machine. The set up program is running and it says it will take 9 days to backup about 56 GB. Is it normal ?

I need to configure a new hard disk as backup disk for time machine.
The set up program is running since two hours and it says it will take 9 days to backup about 56 GB.
Is it normal ?

Roberto 17 wrote:
I started this morning at 12 and after 5 hours now the backup is about 6 GB up on 56 GB.
The new HD is a WD My Passport Edge 500 GB capacity
5 hours to do 6 GB of transfer is NOT normal, even for USB 2.0 so there's something wrong here. I'd say cancel it, wipe the drive and then test the integrity of the drive. Do some file transfers over to and see if it's behaving normally. It could be a bad USB cable, it could be a bad drive or bad enclosure. As it's new, I suspect you haven't really put it through its paces yet and it's important to do that first before commissioning it to serve as your "reliable 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.

If I choose a hard drive ask my backup disk for time machine, will it clear out the data that was previously stored in my hard drive?

If I choose a hard drive ask my backup disk for time machine, will it clear out the data that was previously stored in my hard drive?

Hello edjhsu,
Unless the drive is in a format that isn't compatible with Time Machine, the files will not be overrwitten. However it is typically a better idea to keep your files and your backup separate, especially since files on the Time Machine drive will not be backed up by Time Machine.
Mac Basics: Time Machine backs up your Mac
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427
Cheers,
Allen

Does Time Machine Ever Delete All Traces of a File?

I have a question. I have read up on Time Machine on various articles, posts, and documents across the web and I am having a hard time understanding exactly how time machine deletes files.
When a disk is full, does Time Machine ever make the decision to delete the last copy or version of a file, therefore completely erasing it off the disk forever? I know that Time Machine deletes older versions of files, but will it ever completely delete the last, final backup of a file to make space? If so, I can't imagine using Time Machine as a true piece of backup software. It seems like it would be useful in restoring your computer in an emergency, but as far as backing up files, it seems that it would be catastrophic, because it may choose to delete the last remaing version of a file to make space and you end up losing that file for ever.
Here is an example:
I create a file X.doc
Time Machine backs it up.
I modify X.doc
Time Machine backs up the copy, keeping both the original and the new copy on the backup drive.
I modify X.doc yet again.
Time Machine drive runs out of space. Time Machine deletes the oldest version of X.doc and backs up the new copy.
I create 10 more files unrelated to X.doc
Will Time Macine remove all remaining versions of X.doc to make space for the 10 new files???
I hope I am making sense.

Derek Doublin1 wrote:
Will Time Macine remove all remaining versions of X.doc to make space for the 10 new files???
The worst TM can do is delete all your older copies of files, not the most recent version.
If the drive is full, then it can't accept any more files period.
If you had a full 100GB boot drive and a 100GB TM drive, the TM drive would be a copy of the boot drive with no room for saved states.
If you changed a file on the full boot drive, then TM updates that file on it's full drive, there will be no copy of the previous version of that file.
TimeMachine makes for a poor pernament backup system, because lets say you do a major files addition to your boot drive, TM backs that up and can go ahead and delete files you realized you accidentially deleted just a few short days ago.
It's better than nothing and works ok for newbies, but more seasoned types use many backup methods in addition to TM, because corruption creep is possible with TM as well as malware as it's hooked up so often, in a lot of cases all the time.
Most commonly used backup methods

Will Time Machine back up iTunes media on a different internal drive

I have my iTunes media on a different internal drive.
Will Time machine back up that data as well?
I have two other internal drives, each 750gb.
Does Time Machine back those drives up as well? Or does it contain itself to the OS disk?

Stephen,
Amazingly, Time Machine will do this by default!! In fact, Time Machine will back up every volume that is present at the time of the initial backup, unless told to do otherwise. I keep my iTunes and iPhoto libraries on a secondary partition of my MBP's hard drive, and Time Machine backed that up automatically.
Your backup will be contained in a "Backups.backupdb" folder on whatever external volume you choose to use for Time Machine. Within this folder, you will find other folders named for the various volumes that are being backed up. As far as I know, there is no limit to how many can be kept.
Scott

HT201250 When getting a replacement Seagate hard drive for my Imac through Apple, will they restore my system to it's current state? Or will I have to do it myself though Time Machine? Will Time machine restore all the programs as well?

Apple has determined that certain Seagate 1TB hard drives used in 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMac systems may fail. These systems were sold between October 2009 and July 2011.
Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider (AASP) will replace affected hard drives free of charge.
Will this replacement program restore my system to its current state after the new drive is installed? If not, will I have to have all my original disks to re-install all the programs on my current computer, or will Time Machine restore them as well?

Most of them will tell you to backup your data.
Time Machine is nice, but unless you are interested in archival backup, Carbon Copy Cloner is a lot easier to recover from:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-1992

I have 2 MacBooks at home that back-up to a Time Capsule. I'd like to buy an external Thunderbolt drive at work to have as an additional back-up. Will Time-Machine support autobackups to 2 different devices?

I have 2 MacBooks (1 Air and 1 Pro) at home that back-up to a Time Capsule. I'd like to buy an external Thunderbolt drive at work to have as an additional back-up (so that were there to be a fire/water damage/etc) I would not lose both the computer and the backup.
Will Time-Machine support autobackups to 2 different devices?
I'd like for it to be able to backup to an external Thunderbolt drive attached to my thunderbolt display when I dock the MacBook Air to it.
Does anyone know if this will occur automatically, or if I will have to manually select backup disk?
thanks

Yes, with Mountain Lion you can do this, but I will leave the explanation to Apple Support Communities contributor Pondini:
34. "Rotating" Time Machine backup disks

Due to NAS issues, when I started a new time machine backup it did not have the old backups available. My question is do I need to delete them or will time machine automatically reclaim the space? Only one Sparse Bundle, same name.

Due to NAS issues, when I started a new time machine backup it did not have the old backups available. My question is do I need to delete them or will time machine automatically reclaim the space? There is only one sparse bundle but when I enter time machine I don't see my historic backups. I use a synology DS212 for my time machine. Started a new backup which is 218gb but it says 618 gb is occupied therefore it looks like 2 or 3 backups are still on the disk. Before my NAS issues the last backup was in 2014. As you can see there is a second sparse bundle from 2012. Not sure what that is.

This is an old message now, but what happened to me similarly was:
I had a major computer crash and through complicated pathways ended up reinstalling (Mavericks) as a new user (long story).
At least I had good Time Machine backups on an NAS drive (Synology DS212j), or so I thought - when I started Time Machine up again, the old backup file was gone, replaced by a new one using my "new computer" name. The old file was gone both by directly mounting the NAS drive and by clicking "Enter Time Machine".
It's like I had {OldShareName}.sparsebundle and then it was replaced by {NewShareName}.sparsebundle, all of the old info vanished.
(I have spent a week finding old files elsewhere and have completed a satisfactory self-restore. It pays to "archive" [my own variation of] as well as "back-up".)
My belief is that if this were a wired-netword-drive, e.g. plugged right into my iMac with a USB cable, then the old file would have remained.
But this is an NAS drive, connected directly to my Airport wireless router, and I don't know the significance of the fact that it stores its Time Machine backups as "sparsebundle" files rather than simply as plain(er) files.
As usual when things get complicated with computers (not just Apple computers) there was never a warning message. Something like "YOU'RE ABOUT TO DELETE A TIME MACHINE BACK-UP FILE!!!" would have made my life a lot simpler.
BTW, I did try a "restore from Time Machine" option the first thing I had my "new computer" (old hardware, 2009 iMac) up and running, using Migration Assistant, and it ran for many hours and then failed in the wee hours - what that has to do with anything I'm not sure.
I'm not sure that I have a question about this other than "why do these things happen to me?", but it's a warning. Apart from that I've been very happy with the stability and reliability (but not the cost or set-up complexity) of NAS vs. directly-cabled external drives.
Charles

Will Time Machine delete files on external hard drive?

I have all my itunes music and videos on my external hard drive. Will Time Machine delete these files. The hard drive is already formatted for mac.

Note from Time Machine Help files:
Time Machine works best if you use your backup disk only for Time Machine backups. If you keep files on your backup disk, Time Machine won’t back up those files, and the space available for Time Machine backups will be reduced.
So it will not overwrite the files but it also will not back them up.

Will time machine reinstall photoshop and other softwares that i have added on my iMac ?

I am backing up my disk with time machine so i can fomat my imac and reinstall Lion as i expirience some problems with the faction of my imac !
Will time machine reinstall photoshop and other softwares that i have added on my iMac ?
Do i have to install them again from scratch ?
I have a six year's university work + my research paper for my dissertation , will be restored or i will lose them ?
PLEASE HELP ..
ps: time machine is taking way too long to back up 83gb , is it normal ?

See Pondini's TM FAQs for starters.

Will Time Machine delete what I delete?

If I delete some old photos to free up space on my laptops hard drive, will Time Machine do the same the next time it's plugged into back up hard drive? Or can I just run the old photos from the back up hard drive? thanks

Just to confirm, Thomas has given you the correct answer. TimeMachine keeps multiple save states (which is of great value) but the only thing you can rely on for certain is that TimeMachine will have the same data your computer currently has.
As each new hourly backup is made there is the possibility that the oldest backup set (or several of the oldest backup sets) will have to be deleted. Also, each day the hourly backups are thinned to create a single day backup and each week the 7 days of backups are thinned out to create a weekly backup. So the file you created a couple days ago (or weeks or months) and deleted yesterday may still be on TimeMachine or it may be gone. It depends on whether TimeMachine needed to delete the backup set that file was on to make a new backup set.

Will Time Machine identify a back up hard drive after main has been erased?

I went to the Genius Bar a couple of days ago and was told that in order to fix some of the problems I was having I should do a achieve and install (or maybe erase and install I can't remember.) Then use Time Machine to restore all the files on my computer except for the system and library folders (since there is a lot of stuff inside them that has been causing errors.)
My question is will Time Machine be able to identify my disk after the achieve and install? I looked at the Time Machine Backup from another start up disk and Time Machine just showed up blank. Is that what would happen if I wiped my drive? Or would that only happen if I completely erased the hard drive and not be an issue if I went with the achieve and install?

The Time Machine disk certainly shouldn't look blank - that could indicate a pro blem with your backups not running when you expect.
When you look at your Time Machine disk you should see a 'Backups.backupdb' dire ctory which contains subdirectories for each Time Machine snapshot.
If you don't see these then your Time Machine isn't backing up and you shouldn't re-install your machine :)
If you do see that, then you should be OK (as long as the subdirectories cover r ecent dates), in which case you can run the re-install - I'd go for a 'clean ins tall' and use the 'Copy my settings from a Time Machine backup' which is one of the options after the first boot.

Restore to different disk from Time Machine backup

Using Snow Leopard. I installed a larger hard disk in my Macbook Pro just over a week ago, and kept the old disk. Time Machine had worked before the update and continued to work after the update. So I did another week of work and created new documents, etc. hopefully all backed up.
Then the new larger hard disk crashed, so I had to revert to my old disk which still had the old data on it. The old disk was named xxx180 and the new disk large disk xxx500. The user name and account name were the same on both.
With the old disk now back, if I look into Time Machine, I can only see backups containing data from dates previous to the upgrade, but all of those files are already on my disk. The later dates are there in time machine, but they have no files.
I have tried migration assistant, but it says that I can't have 2 user accounts with the same name - I don't want to re-create the account, just restore a few files.
I have booted from the Snow Leopeard disk and gone into Disk Utility to 'restore from Time Machine', but it says that the large disk information is 475 GB and will not fit onto the old small disk. I know that I only added a few documents and that they shoud fit on the spare space on the old small disk. The difference is only a few days of important text documents.
Can I see the backup files on the Time Machine disk other than through the Time Machine application?

Time Machine - Troubleshooting E3. I can't see backups for a disk/partition that's no longer connected

Multiple destination disks - Will Time Machine ever be able to write to

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