Time machine, space issues.

Hi all,

I'm relatively new to macs (last 3 months) and am unsure as to how to go about the following. I'll try and explain as clearly as I can! I hope I have the right forum too...


I have a 1TB external hard drive for my time machine, which has been running for the last 3 months. It was not backing up my other two external HDs (which I have found out to be because they need to me in mac osx journaled format) and so there is 200gig of music software copied onto the drive, and my itunes of 100-odd gig stored on the drive in a sort of 'self backup'.

I am going to be reformatting my 2 other drives so that they can be properly time machine backed up. The copies on the TM drive will then be deleted.

The Time machine drive will then have roughly 430Gig worth of TM backups on the drive. My 1st external HD has 190Gig to back up, and my 2nd external drive has 260 Gig to back up.

This is going to be very close to the total size of the drive... (1TB = 930gig or something...)

The 190gig HD shouldn't get much bigger in size at all so time machine backups will be few and far between, but the 260gig drive most definitely will (iTunes).

Once converted to the right format, when backing up addition HDs (for the first time also), how will time machine cope?

-Will it say, "not enough room" if I am a few gigs short?
-Will it create the back-ups, but the two new ones have no room to actually back up anymore?
-Will it reduce the size of the 400gig backing up my main HD to make room for the new ones?

Am I packing so much into my time machine drive that it is losing the point of the drive itself?


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It might also be worth mentioning that my TM most definitely has back ups of my itunes from before I moved it to an external drive. Is there a way of just deleting the itunes part of my time machine backups? Hopefully that should save me 50+gig...

Thanks for the help

Jonik

TM deletes the oldest backups to make room for the new

I get that bit, but what if I want to add 2 more HDs to the TM list? When it deletes old things to make room for the new, does it do that overall, or separately for each HD attached?

Is my main HD of 460gig going to stay that level, and the other 2 have to fight for what's left? Or will the other two eat into the saved space of the original TM files?

Personally have not done what you are suggesting.

Do not know if when backing up multiple drives to your TM back up if it keeps separate backups for each drive or if it keeps a single sparse image.

Is there then a way of deleting specific parts of my TM backups? ie, all of the itunes backups throughout the drive?

Open Time Machine
In the finder inside TM, navigate to the file/folder you want to delete all backups off
Once selected,from the drop down box in the finder select " delete all backups of <selected file/folder> "

.... Done ....

Just make sure you know what you are deleting.

Cheers ... McBie

Yes, just delete through TM. As far as multiple drives not deleting oldest back ups and transferring to what is not full, Sounds like a great trial and error scenario. Also seems like you would probably need software for that.

Ahha! Cheers for the file deleting help. That saved me 80gig worth of space!

TM - backups - new backups - new backups = space to work with

931-350-260-190 = 131 GB spare, so hopefully the issues and concerns that I was having in the first post are no longer an issue thanks to the removal of 80Gig of superfluous iTunes files.



Having just thought about my set-up though, I have a 500GB internal hard drive, a 500gb external HD and a 250gig external hd, all hooked up to a 1TB TM drive.

Currently none of the HDs are full, so I have around 130 gig empty on my TM drive. When that fills up though, will I have a problem with the backups? I know that they delete older ones to make room for the new, but doesn't it have to have enough space to hold the entire drive(s) inside TM too?

So, if I filled my main HD, and the 2 externals, I'd have 1.25TB of data trying to be backed up onto a 1TB TM drive. That's not a good idea right?

Thanks for helping me get my head around all of this!

Technically you wont be able to fill out the disks to 100% of their capacity so you are not looking at 1.25 TB

But 1 TB on the TM drive won't be enough either ....

Cheers ... McBie