Anyway to limit the Time Machine backup size without partitioning my external drive?

[aphex]

I have a 1TB external drive that I use for both Time Machine and file storage. Well my file storage takes up about 250gb of space, while time machine just hit about 650gb of space used.

Thats a bit more than I want time machine hanging onto.

is there a way, without deleting or moving anything, to limit the size of the time machine backup?

 

[aphex]

bump!

 

[manly]

I don't believe so. :frown:

 

[Kmax82]

Nope. Did you check to NOT include things like your VM, Aperture/iPhoto library, etc... ? Those will cause the Time Machine backup to be HUGE. I have a 1TB drive at work that I use Time Machine with, and I haven't had an issue. I just simply told it not to back those up (I use the Vault feature in Aperture)... and use Snapshots with my VM, and my Time Machine backup is hovering at around 200-250 GB.

 

[aphex]

Originally posted by: Kmax82
Nope. Did you check to NOT include things like your VM, Aperture/iPhoto library, etc... ? Those will cause the Time Machine backup to be HUGE. I have a 1TB drive at work that I use Time Machine with, and I haven't had an issue. I just simply told it not to back those up (I use the Vault feature in Aperture)... and use Snapshots with my VM, and my Time Machine backup is hovering at around 200-250 GB.

Hmmmm, actually I know I had it set to exclude my Aperture library as its HUGE, but I don't recall setting it to ignore the VM directory, which actually might explain why it kept doing 16gb backups, my VM is 16gb (transfer from an old computer and you can't resize it).

Thanks for the heads up, that makes sense. When I get back to town I'll try it out and report back.

 

[Injury]

I changed the frequency of my backups to only one day a week.

If I'm working on a project that I'd like to have more frequent backups on, I'll just do it manually.

 

[aphex]

So I excluded the VM's but it only knocked about 30gb off the total. Hmmmm.

 

[Injury]

What about media files? Program Installers? Are those getting backed up?

 

[timswim78]

A quick google search show that people are limiting the time machine backup size on a networked drive, and some people report having success with the same method on local disks:
http://discussions.apple.com/m...jspa?messageID=7227083

 

[Kmax82]

Originally posted by: aphex
So I excluded the VM's but it only knocked about 30gb off the total. Hmmmm.

Just as a warning as well, you do need to still manually go through the Time Machine backup and delete those files off the drive. When you choose not to back those up, it doesn't automatically remove them from previous backups.

Apologies if you already were aware of that.