Veronica's Time Machine

[craigz]

Just a thought, are you using Microsoft Entourage for email?

If so, the Office 2008 Identities (or Office 2004 Identities for 2004) contains a single Database file that holds all email. Any change to that file (ie: one new email) requires Time Machine to backup the entire file. That can add up to one big (hungry) space gobbler.

Anyhow, love what you're doing with the show.

-c.

[maniac3389]

I agree with that, but on a more broad perspective, any file that gets updated or added that is large. I know that with the video podcasts that I get I can easily get a 10+GB Time Machine backup if I don't watch and delete them first.

[ArmpitOfDeath]

I third the two suggestions. Lots of video podcasts and Entourage / similar apps will eat up Time Machine space.

This is on one of my Crap Pros, and pretty much all this one has done since being booted up for the first time a short while back is the usual web stuff, some video stuff (which is not Time Machine'd, and the scratch disk is on a non-TM'd drive), download podcasts, sync the iPhone/Touch/Classic and also run Entourage.

My music has increased by probably only about six albums since the particular TM drive was set up, my documents, etc don't live on this machine and the big changes are nearly all from podcasts and Entourage.

http://img516.imageshack.us/img516/7736/picture4po1.jpg

If you want to be pickier about what to back up and when, there is always SuperDuper!. SuperDuper! of course creates disk images, either file-for-file or in sparse image. If you partition or add multiple drives to your Mac - I believe V uses a Crapbook Pro, so less easy than the Pro in terms of adding additional volumes but still possible to have multiple partitions on the internal disk - you can control to an extent what TM backs up by moving anything you don't want TM'd onto the other volume, while still using SuperDuper! to back them up separately. Generally speaking though it looks like even if your uses are pretty limited, you still need to dedicate plenty of storage to Time Machine.

Also - not having a regular HDD connected to your Mac can effectively erase backup disc-capacity worries from your everyday thoughts. The 1Tb Time Crapsule is completely hands off - if deathly slow - and can be stuck in a (well ventilated) corner, out of sight/mind. I use them for my Crapbooks, although I retain regularly updated SuperDuper! images of all my Macs.

[veronicazilla]

I third the two suggestions. Lots of video podcasts and Entourage / similar apps will eat up Time Machine space.

This is on one of my Crap Pros, and pretty much all this one has done since being booted up for the first time a short while back is the usual web stuff, some video stuff (which is not Time Machine'd, and the scratch disk is on a non-TM'd drive), download podcasts, sync the iPhone/Touch/Classic and also run Entourage.

My music has increased by probably only about six albums since the particular TM drive was set up, my documents, etc don't live on this machine and the big changes are nearly all from podcasts and Entourage.

http://img516.imageshack.us/img516/7736/picture4po1.jpg

If you want to be pickier about what to back up and when, there is always SuperDuper!. SuperDuper! of course creates disk images, either file-for-file or in sparse image. If you partition or add multiple drives to your Mac - I believe V uses a Crapbook Pro, so less easy than the Pro in terms of adding additional volumes but still possible to have multiple partitions on the internal disk - you can control to an extent what TM backs up by moving anything you don't want TM'd onto the other volume, while still using SuperDuper! to back them up separately. Generally speaking though it looks like even if your uses are pretty limited, you still need to dedicate plenty of storage to Time Machine.

Also - not having a regular HDD connected to your Mac can effectively erase backup disc-capacity worries from your everyday thoughts. The 1Tb Time Crapsule is completely hands off - if deathly slow - and can be stuck in a (well ventilated) corner, out of sight/mind. I use them for my Crapbooks, although I retain regularly updated SuperDuper! images of all my Macs.

Now THAT is a lovely face ;)

Right. So I did something pretty fraking stupid the other day, and went into my Time Machine backups and deleted about 5 folders worth of backups. I just wanted to see what difference it would make. Lo' and behold, once Trash finally deleted all 350,000 files, my space went up by 100GB in the external drive (to 138GB total out of 500).

I know deleting database things like that is the worse way to go about it, but now I know that TM is copying some huge media files somewhere. Maybe TV shows and video podcasts? You might be right on that, as I just subscribed to a bunch of new ones (plus my Gossip Girl episodes... hehe).

So I guess I need to go tell Time Machine to not back those up anymore.

[swtzrs]

I've been pretty fearful of Time Machine myself since I don't really understand it enough. A transactional backup system just seems like overkill for protecting my data. It may be easy to use, but the ramifications could be pretty intense. Does anyone here know exactly how Time Machine decides when to create backups of files and if each version it creates when the files changes is a complete version or just a record of the changes?

My areas of concern:

1.) Entourage - already mentioned above

2.) Audiobooks - I believe your current listening position is stored in the file so it changes every time you listen to it

3.) Browser histories - is the .flv of *every* YouTube video I've watched going to be stored in the archives? Every web page I read?

4.) Attached files I get in email that I usually just throw away

In addition to this, the more I think about it - I've never really needed an old version of a file. All I really need out of a backup system is the peace of mind that should I unintentionally decide to treat my laptop to a latte one day, I'll only lose a couple weeks of data - not years.

Is Time Machine configurable to be just a simple, scheduled backup system? Every week, delete the old version of the backup and make a copy of the current contents? I know that isn't considered the best system since you could end up with a corrupted system and not know it until you also have a corrupted backup, but if Time Machine can't be setup this way, I think I'll be sticking with SuperDuper (a great application with a name that's both funny and lame).

[ArmpitOfDeath]

Now THAT is a lovely face ;)

Total coincidence to be honest with you - I happened to be browsing this very thread when I was watching the episode and I paused it to draft the reply. When I looked back it was such a perfect expression that I had to include it in the Cmd-Shift-4 :P

[ArmpitOfDeath]

swizrs, it's certainly not sophisticated enough to store differential data. It will copy the entire file based on its change date.

As I said above I have the hunkahunka burning disk that is Time Crapsule for backing up the Crapbook Air, Crapbook and the Crapbook Pros that I use at/from home - and I believe I've already almost maxed out the disk, but of course I don't care because that's what the TC is for. Although I do use intensive apps on one of the Crapbook Pros with large datasets, all that really happens on the rest of the notebooks are Entourage again, with a few documents in Office and Keynote.

Is Time Machine configurable to be just a simple, scheduled backup system? Every week, delete the old version of the backup and make a copy of the current contents? I know that isn't considered the best system since you could end up with a corrupted system and not know it until you also have a corrupted backup, but if Time Machine can't be setup this way, I think I'll be sticking with SuperDuper (a great application with a name that's both funny and lame).Not at the moment. Acronis on Windows does a more intelligent job in backups for me, as does - well, Windows in general. But like most other things on OS X you've got one tool that works well and is a realistic option for most (in this case Superduper!) and that's it. And for your use, continuing with Superduper! (have I mentioned SuperDuper! in the way of Prompt! enough?) seems to be the way to go.

[chris3d]

Veronica, you may want to look into WhatSize (http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/13006) to see where these huge files are coming from. It will let you sort the entire drive or specific folders, and lists the files / directories from the largest to smallest size. It is a demo license, but it didn't bug me with too many with prompts or anything.

[jonnie]

I recently brought home a 500G external drive, HFS Mac formatted, to sit under the AirPort Express. I use Bonjour and it sees the drive on any Mac in the house (but obviously not my Vista machine becasue of the HFS I suppose).

Intially Time Macine did not see the drive. However everthing now works great after I found a link to make TM see a network drive - I just did Step #4 from: http://is.gd/ilM

I'm a Windows person and no special skills other than a lot of curiosity, so if there was an easier way, I didn't stumble across it.

I use a local drive for my Vista machine and Allway Sync (software), and have everything set to manual. I can't see the new drive (which I knew would happen), but do have an older 120G formatted in FAT32 also plugged into the AirPort Extreme which I can see and move files across systems with.

It will be interesting to see what TM does on the Macbook Pro - I'm curious if the file size issue will happen like it did with Veronica.

[ArmpitOfDeath]

Veronica, you may want to look into WhatSize (http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/13006) to see where these huge files are coming from. It will let you sort the entire drive or specific folders, and lists the files / directories from the largest to smallest size. It is a demo license, but it didn't bug me with too many with prompts or anything.

Good thinking!

As one of the earlier buyers for the Macupdate bundle I got Whatsize - never bothered installing it. I'll give it a go to see what's lurking in TM.

[gobo]

There's also Disk Inventory X which'll let you see where big files are easily too.

[ArmpitOfDeath]

Hmmm. I can't get Whatsize to catalog my TM drive. It always crashes.
Oh well, time to deal with the usual OS X permissions, etc issues that I never have to bother with under Vista...

[nickhamm]

I am a fan of Disk Inventory X. Whenever I start to wonder where the space goes on my hard drives or why my Mozy backup went from 500MB total to over 8GB, I fire up Disk Inventory X and usually find a Virtual Machine or DVD project I forgot I had in the Documents folder. Excellent software for free.

[nokomis_fl]

My brother the mechanical engineer recently drank the Apple Kool-Aid after switching to PCs close to 20 years ago (family's first Apple was a IIe). In his recent total immersion mode he has found that Time Machine will eat up a lot of hard drive space with duplicates.

The What Size advice is very good, IMO. Use it to see what is actually there and free up space by getting rid of any dupes.

[cavemonkey50]

Do you use VMware? VMware VMs used to be excluded in previous versions, but they are now backed up with Time Machine again. Every load of a VM will have Time Machine backup the entire VM, wasting space quickly.

[ArmpitOfDeath]

I watched the followup show and the advice. While it's good advice saving disk space, I can't help feeling it's slightly bad advice given most people's use of Time Machine.

By that, I mean it may slip past people as they're happily excluding folders that those folders are no longer being backed up. I mean that should be pretty obvious, but I've met a lot of Mac users / rabid Applemaniacs and I really wouldn't put it past you lot ( :P ). Entourage taking up too much space? Exclude Identity folder? What if the Entourage folder goes kaput? The situation is similar for the TV Shows folder, etc.

OK - so with the latter it might be possible to go crying to Apple. But still...

You should still back up any excluded folders using SuperDuper! or similar. I'd put it on a daily schedule so even if you aren't always attached to your TM disk you don't forget.