Thanks Chris.
From: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com [mailto:macvisionaries@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Chris Blouch Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 12:14 PM To: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Restoring files from a Time Machine Backup Two bits I wanted to clarify here to make sure you're not getting unexpected results. First is to be sure you've got a separate drive for your time machine backups. This should be obvious but if you're backing up to the same drive as the original data and that drive fails you lose your backup as well. Time machine backups also expand to consume all available space on a volume so if you backup to your boot drive you'll eventually run out of space. Assuming you have a separate backup drive, getting info on it to see how much space is available isn't really informative as Time Machine manages its space on its own. First it will make incremental backups once an hour until it fills up all available space on the backup volume. At that point it will start to prune the oldest backups first to make room for new backups. So the bigger your drive and the smaller the incremental changes the further back in time you can go to restore stuff. The other bit is to be careful when backing up VM images. Most images are quite large, 5-10GB in size or more, and one change to one document on the Windows side means then entire virtual machine file will need to get backed up. This means once a hour time machine will be stashing something around 10GB data into its backup which will greatly reduce the number of incrementals it can store. Even if you have a decent sized time machine drive, that's going to get used up quick. It also means that everything will slow down as your Mac tries to fling GB of data from your main drive to the backups each hour. Throw Jaws on top of Windows with VMWare with a Time Machine backup running and you have a not-so-great experience. So there are a couple things you can do to minimize this: 1. Don't back up the VMWare images. I pretty much use Windows just to test stuff out, not for everyday work. So I just keep a compressed copy of a clean virtual machine around. If something goes wrong or it's time to get back to a clean state I just toss my current virtual machine in the trash and uncompress a fresh copy. That means there is no good reason for to be backing up my virtual machine. Time Machine lets you exclude folders and files from backups by going to Preferences -> Time Machine -> Options and then choose the "Add item to do not backup list button". 2. Use multiple segment hard drives. When creating a virtual machine, newer versions of Fusion now split the hard drive into multiple 2GB chunks. So hopefully updating one file inside of Windows only effects one of those chunks. You can change to the chunked version if your machine is shut down and then choose Settings -> Hard Disks and then choose the Split into 2GB files checkbox and then the Apply button. In practice I'm not sure how much difference this makes since Windows normal operation is to mark its territory by touching files all over the drive, but you might get lucky and eliminate backing up a few of those 2GB files. 3. Use shared folders You can share folders between your mac and Windows so it might make sense to store your Windows documents in the Documents folder on the Mac. That way there is nothing valuable in the virtual machine. That means you can either do #1 and not back it up since everything is replaceable, or #2 might apply since the files you modify will be on the Mac side, not in the virtual machine (windows touching the hard drive all over caveat still applies). You can do this for your virtual machine when it is shut down by choosing Sharing in the settings. Turn on the "Share folders on your Mac" and then go to the first unlabeled button after the empty table which is the Add button to pick a folder to share. Navigate to your documents folder and then click Add. Note that VMWare for some reason blocks using command-shift-O to jump to your documents folder so you'll have to pick it from the left nav or other means. Hope this helps. CB On 7/7/11 9:46 PM, Paul Hunt wrote: Hello everyone. I have never restored files or folders from a Time Machine backup. Since I use VM Fusion I will probably need to restore my image at some point. Can this be done accessibly using Voice Over? If so, what are the procedures? Also, how can I quickly check my free space on the Mac Mini? Thanks so much. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
