A few questions regarding Time Machine

Hi,

1. Using the regular and automatic hourly and daily backups is not convenient for me, and I end up doing backups at highly irregular intervals. Will this cause problems once the backup disk is full and Time machine has to delete older backups? Is there any risk that Time Machine will accidentally delete vital data?

2. Is there a way to set aside space on a hard disk so that it will not be used up by Time Machine backups? I use a single disk for everything, and I need to keep empty parts of if the need to store files arises in the future.

thanks in advance

I'll give this a shot and let the smarter people come along and clean it up...

Virgeist said:

Hi,

1. Using the regular and automatic hourly and daily backups is not convenient for me, and I end up doing backups at highly irregular intervals. Will this cause problems once the backup disk is full and Time machine has to delete older backups? Is there any risk that Time Machine will accidentally delete vital data?

Click to expand...

I don't use Time Machine hourly either - it's not a problem. The second part of your question - yes - Time Machine will eventually start to overwrite it's backups once the disk is full - but you can set it (it is by default) to prompt you for permission before it overwrites the data.

Virgeist said:

2. Is there a way to set aside space on a hard disk so that it will not be used up by Time Machine backups? I use a single disk for everything, and I need to keep empty parts of if the need to store files arises in the future.

thanks in advance

Click to expand...

I'm assuming you're using an external HDD for your TM backups? - yes - you can partition a drive and designate that partition to be used just for Time Machine. That's what I have currently although I'm planning to migrate to a NAS solution soon.

Thanks for the quick reply, could you provide me with instructions on how to partition a drive or more details on what you refer to as NAS.

It's super simple these days - just mount the drive you want to partition and use Disk Utility - it does all the work for you. Mac OS X 10.6 Help: Partitioning a disk

The simple version of a NAS solution is Time Capsule. Whatever I setup will have similar functionality so reading this should give you the idea of what I'm talking about. Time-Capsule-2TB