just wondering what hard drives people here use for time machine. Im looking into buying an external for my 500gb 13" mbp and cant decide between enclosures or externals. I went through a few enclosures already and was never really happy with them because of how loud the fans are or how hard it is to fit the hard drives and cables inside. The current one I have i disconnected the fan so it won't be loud and I'm wondering if it would have heat issues being turned on for long periods of time as a time machine hard drive.
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time machine external
- Thread starter syn3rgyz
- Start date
I have mainly have a lot of music and some college / freelance graphics work. I've used 70gb for bootcamp and 100gb out of the rest. I'm assuming the enclosure route would be cheapter but I'm still wondering if heat would be an issue for something thats gonna be running most of the time.
I dont plan on getting a time capsule it costs too much and i don't need a router.
how much bigger than my drive should the backup drive be?
I dont plan on getting a time capsule it costs too much and i don't need a router.
how much bigger than my drive should the backup drive be?
Time Machine drives don't run most of the time. OS X keeps track of your file changes and updates about once an hour. The drive isn't used for the next 58 minutes. If your external drive spins the drive down after a certain amount of inactivity, you're golden. And again, buy a WD Green drive if you want to use an enclosure.
As big as you want. Time Machine will automatically delete the oldest backup when the drive fills. Ideally you'll want something with at least the same capacity as your internal HDD, but it's not exactly a requirement.
i personally like this
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MOTGSU2/
they have fw 800 if you want the speed
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MOTGSU2/
they have fw 800 if you want the speed
I use a 1tb seagate st31000340ns in a rocketfish 3.5in enclosure.
It took me a bit to figure out, but I had to setup a time machine partition as I didn't want time machine filling up the entire drive. So I just gave it 160gb (i don't keep much on my mbp).
It took me a bit to figure out, but I had to setup a time machine partition as I didn't want time machine filling up the entire drive. So I just gave it 160gb (i don't keep much on my mbp).
LithiumRage158
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2006
- Messages
- 273
I really like my G-Tech G-Drive Q. I have the 500 gig model, and it's a fanless design. The real draw to the drive is that it has four interfaces - eSata, Firewire 800 and 400, and of course USB. Firewire 800 has really spoiled me - I don't think I could go back to using a USB drive. Another cool thing about it, it's a 7200 RPM drive, so if you're using Firewire, you're going to see some nice read/write speeds. However - if you're looking for a drive you can put in your laptop case and carry places with you, this is NOT the drive for you. It weighs almost 10 pounds, and it has a power brick, and that itself makes it frustrating to take places.
The real draw to Time Machine is the ability to go back to any point in time and restore a version of a file. If your Time Machine drive is the same size as your internal drive, you defeat this purpose. Personally, I would go as big on the backup drive as you can afford and let Time Machine work the way it's supposed to work. Something to take in to account, If you ahve a large file (say a 20GB virtual machine) any time you boot up that virtual machine, files are being changed which in turn will cause Time Machine to backup that entire VM...again. Not realizing this, I ended up burning a 1.5 TB NAS in no time. I ended up deleting my entire backup and starting over, making some changes so I wouldn;t get every revision of my VMs.
XBarbarian
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2006
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That will be a concern of mine as well. Did you manage that through Time Machine..or some way else. I will have multiple VM images..certainly don't need multiple versions of a big file like that.
So, Time Machine allowed you to set the VM ( or any file set I suppose ) back up seperately?
I don't remember how I corrected the problem. I think it was a setting within Fusion but I don't remember. There isn't much you can set or not set in Time Machine, it's either on or off really.
Not really true. Time Machine allows you to exclude anything you want. If it's backing up your VMs, it's because you allowed it to, because you weren't diligent about your exclusion list.
Why would I NOT want to backup my VMs? I just didn't want them backed-up every single time I booted them up. You're right though, you can exclude things if you don't want them backed up at all.
My point is that you don't need to back up the entirety of the VM every single time. You can back it up once and then exclude everything except the config files the VM changes over time. It's not like Time Machine exclusions are retroactive.