Is there anything I need to know before activating Time Machine on my Mac Pro? I have three internal hard drives. Is the WD My Book just plug and play with Time Machine or should I run the software that the WD quick start manual says to run?
Getting ready to activate Time Machine; any tips?
- Thread starter biggestmuff
- Start date
You will first want to make sure that the drive is formatted HFS+ (Mac OS File System Extended), next, if you have any desire at all to use this drive as non TimeMachine storage, then go ahead and break off a partition since TM will use every byte that you give it eventually.
The drive is formatted HFS+ as it's shipped Mac ready.
I'll have to decide on how much I want to set aside for personal storage. That shouldn't be too difficult, huh?
Also, could you explain how Time Machine works? Does it mirror the other drives, only store deleted/changed files or a combination of the two? I'm asking because I have three drives in my Mac Pro; a 300GB (OS/Apps) and two 500GB. Of the two 500GB drives, one stores all of my recordings and Logic projects (this Mac is a DAW) and the other drive stores sound libraries for my soft samplers. The hard drive with the sound libraries is nearly maxed. However, the sound library files will almost never be changed except for an odd update from the sound library's developer. Will Time Machine back up the sound library hard drive or will it only back up files that are deleted/changed...or maybe both? I'd like to know this as it will help me to decide how much drive space on the WD My Book I need to set aside for Time Machine.
I'll have to decide on how much I want to set aside for personal storage. That shouldn't be too difficult, huh?
Also, could you explain how Time Machine works? Does it mirror the other drives, only store deleted/changed files or a combination of the two? I'm asking because I have three drives in my Mac Pro; a 300GB (OS/Apps) and two 500GB. Of the two 500GB drives, one stores all of my recordings and Logic projects (this Mac is a DAW) and the other drive stores sound libraries for my soft samplers. The hard drive with the sound libraries is nearly maxed. However, the sound library files will almost never be changed except for an odd update from the sound library's developer. Will Time Machine back up the sound library hard drive or will it only back up files that are deleted/changed...or maybe both? I'd like to know this as it will help me to decide how much drive space on the WD My Book I need to set aside for Time Machine.
Yeah, you should partition it. That may be too much space.
You can set what Time Machine backs up.
You can set what Time Machine backs up.
In the System Preferences, you can tell Time Machine what to exclude.
The first backup will take forever, it will be an initial, in place backup of all your files.
Then, every hour it will see what has changed and copy those files over. At the end of every day, it consolidates those down and removes duplicates and if for example you are working on a document, it will back up lots of copies. At the end of the day, it will only keep the original and the latest update.
It does the same at the end of each week, month and then year (at least that is how I have understood it to work)
The first backup will take forever, it will be an initial, in place backup of all your files.
Then, every hour it will see what has changed and copy those files over. At the end of every day, it consolidates those down and removes duplicates and if for example you are working on a document, it will back up lots of copies. At the end of the day, it will only keep the original and the latest update.
It does the same at the end of each week, month and then year (at least that is how I have understood it to work)
It should backup all drives.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=426590
According to this. I assume the same thing.
Time Machine progressively backups up your drive. Whenever you change a file it will update on Time Machine. That way you can go back in 'time' to retrieve something. Initially it will take a while to backup your files. Once you do it the first time, the future instances when Time Machine runs, will be a lot shorter unless you keep adding gigs of data.
EDIT: TheStu beats me again
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=426590
According to this. I assume the same thing.
Time Machine progressively backups up your drive. Whenever you change a file it will update on Time Machine. That way you can go back in 'time' to retrieve something. Initially it will take a while to backup your files. Once you do it the first time, the future instances when Time Machine runs, will be a lot shorter unless you keep adding gigs of data.
EDIT: TheStu beats me again
mugs
Lifer
- Apr 29, 2003
- 48,920
- 46
- 91
In addition to what TheStu said, it's worth mentioning that Time Machine differs from some other incremental backup software in that it creates hard links to any files that haven't changed since the last backup. The result is that every single backup contains every single file on your hard drive (except the ones you excluded and the ones Apple excludes), but each version of each file is only stored on the disk once. When all hard links are deleted (as the disk fills and old backups have to be deleted), the single copy of the file is deleted.
Because of these hard links, you can browse any individual backup and find the state of any file on your hard drive at that point in time. It also means that each backup will appear to consume many GBs even if only a few files have changed since the previous backup. In reality since every file is stored only once, each incremental backup only consumes as much space as the files that have changed. You can see this by looking at the free space on the disk.
I hope that didn't confuse you.
Because of these hard links, you can browse any individual backup and find the state of any file on your hard drive at that point in time. It also means that each backup will appear to consume many GBs even if only a few files have changed since the previous backup. In reality since every file is stored only once, each incremental backup only consumes as much space as the files that have changed. You can see this by looking at the free space on the disk.
I hope that didn't confuse you.
Tegeril
Platinum Member
- Apr 2, 2003
- 2,906
- 5
- 81
Mugs couldn't have explained it any better. The one remaining thing you will notice if you are using the drive connected to an airport extreme or in a time machine base station is that Time Machine will store all of this information within a .sparseimage file named after your computer (maybe it does this if the drive is directly connected as well, I don't recall). This allows you to backup multiple computers and they will each be assigned their own sparseimage on the volume.
Yea, I love Time Machine, but I'd love to be able to have multiple Time Machine disks. I hate that if I set it up with one disk, I can't then go to another location and use another disk without disabling the disk I just setup. If anyone knows if there's a way to do that, I'd love to hear it.
I use it with multiple disks no problem .. granted there's a little work involved but it works great.
The second post should get you started ...
http://forums.macnn.com/82/app...hine-at-home-and-work/
So, after about three weeks, I finally started backing up my Mac Pro. I began about 4 hours ago and the process is about 2/3 of the way finished. My system currently has 682 GB of data that I'm backing up to the 1 TB, external harddrive.
You might be able to it all depends on how used the drive it. HFS+ does allow for dynamic partitioning.
I thing I would suggest is that say you have movies that you want backed up.
I would create two partitions one for backing up movies, and the other on Time Machine, or use two hard drive instead or something.
I would create two partitions one for backing up movies, and the other on Time Machine, or use two hard drive instead or something.
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