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Getting ready to activate Time Machine; any tips?

B

biggestmuff

Diamond Member
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?
 
Originally posted by: biggestmuff
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?
Click to expand...

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.
 
Configure Time Machine to skip over your porn folder. No reason to fill up half your backup drive with stuff you can download again later. 😉

If you have really important files, make periodic off-site backups.
 
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.
 
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)
 
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 🙁
 
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.
 
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.
 
Originally posted by: Kmax82
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
Is there a way to partition a drive after you have already been running Time Machine on it for a while? I backup three drives to this disk, so I would prefer to not have to start over.

MotionMan
 
Originally posted by: MotionMan
Is there a way to partition a drive after you have already been running Time Machine on it for a while? I backup three drives to this disk, so I would prefer to not have to start over.

MotionMan
Click to expand...

You might be able to it all depends on how used the drive it. HFS+ does allow for dynamic partitioning.
 
Originally posted by: TheStu
Originally posted by: MotionMan
Is there a way to partition a drive after you have already been running Time Machine on it for a while? I backup three drives to this disk, so I would prefer to not have to start over.

MotionMan
Click to expand...

You might be able to it all depends on how used the drive it. HFS+ does allow for dynamic partitioning.
Click to expand...

How would I do that? Is there a built-in utility or an app I need to download?

MotionMan
 
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 use time machine on my system drive and my project drive but I only have it back up when I tell it to. I have conflicts with my software when it runs. I think its related to my project drive and the timemachine disk both being on the firewire bus.
 
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