A more powerful Time Machine!
One thing that I was disappointed about Time Machine is how little you can customize the preferences. There is a freeware called "TimeMachineEditor" that lets you change the default one hour backup interval. You can download TimeMachineEditor here from MacUpdate.
I think this solves a part of the problem, but there is still a feature that I would like to see and I really hope Apple will consider it for Snow Leopard: the possibility of limiting the amount of space Time Machine is allowed to use on the external drive.
I think this solves a part of the problem, but there is still a feature that I would like to see and I really hope Apple will consider it for Snow Leopard: the possibility of limiting the amount of space Time Machine is allowed to use on the external drive.
posted by Frederic Tremblay at
11/06/2008
4 Comments:
I guess a preference to limit the amount of space it uses would be useful... but there's a way to do that sort of thing already - partition your external drive and set Time Machine's portion to exactly how much you want it to use.
I have a 500gb Lacie drive, and 250gb is dedicated to Time Machine. If it ever fills that 250gb, it will start erasing the oldest backups.
I then have 200gb for storage and 50gb FAT32 for swapping things on my wife's PC.
Good tip! Both my macbooks are the older ones without 802.11n, so backups over wireless can sometimes take a while and be a huge drain on the system - backing up less often is useful.
If you use a network backup, you can use the command line to set the size of Time Machine's sparsebundle. I have a 250 GB drive, with one sparsebundle set to 100 GB. Time machine uses the allocated 100 GB but no more.
But yes, it would be a nice feature to be able to set this in the preferences. Or even an option to trim time machine - you tell it to trim to 100 GB, and it deletes enough backups to meet that - making transferring to a smaller disk simple.
You can manually change the 1 hour backup: What I do is after I have uploaded a photoshoot, I tell TimeMachine to "back up now" without waiting for the 1 hour interval.
Or you can use SuperDuper. I like it much better than TimeMachine - fast and easy to use. Makes a bootable clone of your drive.
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