Time machine question.

Hi.

I'm in the middle of setting up my MBA.

Time machine sounds like a good idea.

My MBA ssd is 128gb so will a 500gb external harddrive be large enough for time machine.

How often do you need to hook up the harddrive ?

If I don't turn time machine on what would I lose.

I assume re installing Lion from Apples online servers is not affected

What would I lose ?

chunkylee said:

Hi.

I'm in the middle of setting up my MBA.

Time machine sounds like a good idea.

My MBA ssd is 128gb so will a 500gb external harddrive be large enough for time machine.

Click to expand...

Yes. The drive must be equal to or greater than your internal drive. The larger the drive, the more revisions of each file Time Machine can back up.

How often do you need to hook up the harddrive ?

Click to expand...

It depends on how sensitive your work is. If you could potentially afford to lose a month's work, then once a month is fine. If you want the best possible protection, keep it connected all the time.

If I don't turn time machine on what would I lose.

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Nothing. Time Machine backs up your files. Assuming your SSD never goes bad and you rarely store important data on your computer, then you stand to lose nothing. But if you like the idea of having multiple revisions of your data backed up on a regular basis, then it's definitely a good idea.

SSDs are not nearly as failure prone as a traditional hard drive, but they do still have a finite life.

I assume re installing Lion from Apples online servers is not affected

Click to expand...

That's right - even without a backup, you can restore the operating system from Apple directly.

What would I lose ?

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I don't think the question should be "what would I lose", as much as it should be "what do I stand to gain by having a Time Machine backup?".

Thank you for your reply.

I think i will be getting a portable external hard drive today.

Better to be safe than sorry.

I assume even tho I'm using it for time machine I can still store other data on it ?

Time Machine requires a dedicated partition, so if you want to store additional data on it, you'll need to divide the drive into partitions using Disk Utility.

In that case i'll just use the 500gb external drive for time machine only.

chunkylee said:

In that case i'll just use the 500gb external drive for time machine only.

Click to expand...

Why? You could easily set it up with a 250GB partition for Time Machine and a second 250GB partition for storage and it would be fine.

cwa107 said:

Time Machine requires a dedicated partition, so if you want to store additional data on it, you'll need to divide the drive into partitions using Disk Utility.

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Are you sure about that? I am pretty sure that at some point I have had my Time Machine backup and other files on the same drive.

My current backup is on a drive that is attached to a Time capsule. It has both the Time Machine sparse bundle and other files on it. having said that it is probably best to have Time Machine separate from other things.

Slydude said:

Are you sure about that? I am pretty sure that at some point I have had my Time Machine backup and other files on the same drive.

My current backup is on a drive that is attached to a Time capsule. It has both the Time Machine sparse bundle and other files on it. having said that it is probably best to have Time Machine separate from other things.

Click to expand...

Now that you mention it, I've never tried to store any other data on a TM partition as I thought I had read that in Apple's documentation. Regardless, it's still a best practice to keep the TM backup to its own partition.

cwa107 said:

Regardless, it's still a best practice to keep the TM backup to its own partition.

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I agree. Especially when you see users about to put critical files on the same partition as the Time Machine backup of this files.

Thanks for the advice guys.