?naming a pen drive

[jaguarMac]

A Macworld article about using a pen drive for a Time Machine backup says to first name the pen drive but then doesn't say how to do it? What?
I guess they think mankind has evolved to the point of reading minds or something.
I know its got to be super easy but I just don't know how to do it. help!

 

[Slydude]

You can find directions for doing that here. You can ignore the part about using Terminal to format the disk. Make sure to format the drive MacOS Extended Journaled. Although this should work OK in theory, in practice it might not be the best solution. Many thumb drives seem to be notorious for not holding up well under heavy use.

 

[jaguarMac]

that article only talks about formatting the pen drive. I've already done that. I want to change its name from "untitled" to "Big Boy". How?

 

[Rod]

I would also suggest that the pen drive be at least the same size as your Mac HD. So dependant on the size of your Mac HD you may require a 150-500Gb pen drive. Although that may be possible if a little expensive a USB Hard drive might be a better alternative.

 

[jaguarMac]

that's weird because Time Machine says I need only at least 30GB so I bought a 64GB drive.

 

[harryb2448]

64GB will not be anywhere near big enough. With the dive connected, click on the name to highlight the type in your preferred name.

 

[jaguarMac]

I'm doing the backup now and it shows that the total is 26.7GB.
It's slow as it will take around 4 hours total to finish.

 

[Rod]

What is the storage size of your Mac HD?


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[Rod]

I only ask because the smallest HD available for a Mac is 128Gb.


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[Rod]

As for naming your pen drive just click once on its name either on the desktop if it appears there or in the sidebar of a finder window. The first click will highlight it the second click will make it an editable box. But don't do this while you are backing up because it will change the destination in the directory for the backup. Usually this is done during the formatting process in the name box where the generic name appears.


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[chas_m]

The reason the Macworld article didn't mention how rename the drive is because it's a precisely the same as renaming a file, which is an incredibly common procedure the people do all the time, so it's assumed knowledge.

 

[jaguarMac]

my HD is 128GB.
Each time I do a backup does it write over the previous backup? Or does it wait till all the storage memory is used up?

 

[Rod]

It waits until all the available storage is used up then it starts deleting the oldest backups.
So is this a relatively new computer for you? It is entirely possible that you only have 30Gb or less on it at the moment as the operating system and native applications don't use up that much space but potentially you have at least 100Gb spare which in my experience will, like a spare wardrobe, eventually get filled with documents, pictures, music, other applications and data related to the things I have mentioned. So if you had asked what size external hard drive do I need for time machine backups on my computer I would have said 300GB minimum. This will allow a reasonable time before the oldest backups start being deleted.

 

[jaguarMac]

I looked at what was put on the pen drive and I didn't see any pictures or music. Is that unusual? (I have Mavericks on a Macbook Pro)

 

[Rod]

It depends what you chose to backup. By default Time Machine should back up your whole Mac HD unless you exclude items in the preferences window.