Good to know, I thought the backup was a single, constantly updated copy of the drive. I now see why one needs (or should have) twice the space as the drive being backed up.
On 2/3/12, Chris Blouch <cblo...@aol.com> wrote: > To elaborate on #1 and #2: > > You can use any external hard drive and TimeMachine will keep adding > incremental backups until the drive is full and then delete the oldest > one first. Actually it's a little more elaborate than that. From Wikipedia: > > Time Machine saves hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups > for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month > until the volume runs out of space. At that point, Time Machine deletes > the oldest weekly backup. > > You don't want to share this drive with TimeMachine for anything else > because Time Machine eventually consumes all available space, like a big > black hole :) > > So along those lines, time machine is a regular Mac formatted disk so > you could set up just a partition for it to operate on and use the rest > of the drive space for something else. I actually have a second Mac as > my time machine backup drive. I have a 2TB drive in the remote machine > with a 1TB partition. I then share that with file sharing and then mount > that on my laptop and point to the network volume with Time machine. > When TimeMachine kicks off for the hourly backup it just mounts up that > drive and does its thing. When I'm away from my desk time machine just > fails but will try again when I'm back. > > CB > > On 2/3/12 3:23 PM, Scott Howell wrote: >> Alex answers follow below: >> >> On Feb 3, 2012, at 1:50 PM, Alex Hall wrote: >>> 1. Will any external hard drive work? >> ALex you may use any external drive you like. However, you should ensure >> you have of course sufficient capacity and in fact you may consider having >> a drive that is at least twice the capacity of the drive you are backing >> up. THis is not a requirement, but a consideration. >> >> >>> 2. Do I need to format it in a special way? If so, can I make a >>> partition on it to use for backups and leave the rest readable by >>> Windows computers? >> I do not recall whether it matters, but the TIme Machine utility takes >> care of this if I recall correctly. You could split the drive into >> multiple partitions and choose where you want TIme Machine to place the >> backups. >> >>> 3. Is time machine fully accessible? >> I have not had any problems using TIme Machine. >> >> >>> 4. Are time machine backups readable? That is, if I wanted a file off >>> an old backup but did not want to restore the whole thing, could I >>> just browse to that file and copy it like normal? >> Yes. >> >>> 5. Is anything not backed up? >> The only files that come to mind which are not backed up are those that >> have no impact on operation of your Mac. In other words these are files >> you do not have direct access to and are only used by the current instance >> of the OS. So if you restored the entire machine or cloned the drive you >> would not want these files. >> >>> 6. If I had to restore, and I had newer files than in the backup, what >>> happens? In other words, is there a way to restore only system folders >>> so that files modified since the backup are not overwritten with older >>> versions? >> Interesting question since I'm not sure how this condition would occur >> really. I'm trying to invision a scenario that might apply in this case. >> >> hth, >> >> >>> Thanks in advance. >>> -- >>> Have a great day, >>> Alex (msg sent from GMail website) >>> mehg...@gmail.com; http://www.facebook.com/mehgcap >>> >>> -- >>> 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. > > -- Have a great day, Alex (msg sent from GMail website) mehg...@gmail.com; http://www.facebook.com/mehgcap -- 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.
