Time Machine harddrive size

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Your Mac's Specs
MPB 2.2 Intel Core Duo 2gb Ram - G5 Tower PPC - iPhone 4 - 2x3GHZ 12gb Ram MacPro Tower, ATV2
HI

My iMac has a 1tb Hard drive

Should my time machine drive ( a 3rd party device) be the same size or large i.e 2 tb?

Thanks
 

bobtomay

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Your Mac's Specs
15" MBP '06 2.33 C2D 4GB 10.7; 13" MBA '14 1.8 i7 8GB 10.11; 21" iMac '13 2.9 i5 8GB 10.11; 6S
Typically recommended is twice the size of your OS X partition/drive.
Really depends on how much data is kept on and moved on/off the partition.

ex 1
My wife could have a 1TB drive in her computer - meanwhile the total data on her current machine that she has been using for 6 yrs now is <40GB. Her current Time machine backup with 3 yrs+ of backups is <50GB. So, the double the partition size is irrelevant related to her usage.

ex 2
Meanwhile, the 250GB SSD in my MacBook Air with only 120GB used, my 1 year old TM backup is just under 600GB in size. As you can see, the double size would not work for me either or my oldest backups would already have been deleted in less than a year.

Both machines run with the typical hourly TM backups.

Only you know how much data you typically use and how much additional stuff you move on and off the drive and whether any of that really needs to be backed up.
 

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