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Time Machine Scares Me :(


Masna
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Time Machine seems like an awesome feature, and a great way to backup. But what scares me is the fact that it literally backs up everything. Every file, folder, setting, and any change made to all of the above. What really scares me about this is... Well, won't all this backing up call for a tremendous amount of space? 10 files, over time, can amount to a few gigs of space... No? Maybe Apple has done this in a very innovative manner, where the minimum amount of space possible is used... But, I can't logic it out. Anyone?

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Well, the way I see it, you'd need an external hard drive which is about 4 times the size of your internal drive. And, theoretically, you'd need an infinite amount of external space... If you see where I'm going with this.

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No, you see... I do not see where you are going with this Masna.

 

Most people do not use that much space for their own personal stuff. Most of the hard disk space used for Applications and Operating System data.

 

As far as the Apps go, you just add your /Applications folder to your Exclude list for Time Machine. For me alone, that saves me 54GB of stuff.

 

On top of that, I also have added /Libraries/Audio to get rid of the Garage Band Loops from Time Machine (an additional 15GB for all of them).

 

My Documents folder is 250MB, with an additional xCode directory in my Home that takes up a good 800MB.

 

Next in line, you have Music. Odds are that people are not going to be deleting stuff that they already have purchased.

 

Frankly, I love the fact that Leopard is backing up System files in TimeMachine right now. That means that if something truly horrible were to happen like 50,000 viruses come out next month and Antivirus becomes a necessity, AV apps can tie in with TimeMachine to pull up the Original system files and replace the infected versions with your clean copies, retaining any customization to the OS that you may have done.

 

That being the case, I have TimeMachine backing up 51GB of stuff taking into account my complete system minus /Applications and /Library/Audio

 

Maybe in time I will turn on those as well. But still, I am greatly looking forward to a Time Machine implementation in Leopard Server for the clients, meaning that System files are stripped out and one copy is kept as the master, Applications are all stored centrally so that it does not keep duplication of those as well, in turn meaning that the only stuff stored beyond the initial required stuff that applies to all systems in a network is ONLY /Users

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  • 2 weeks later...

My Backups.backupdb file on the external HD is only about 10 Gigs in size, but I made a complete backup from my HD that holds more than 90 Gigs of files. This is strange, can't be true, can't be a good sign or am I wrong?

How big are your Time Machine backups?

 

I'd be very glad to read a detailed article on how Time Machine is working, how you can restore your files in case of a major -maybe hardware-crash of your hd... Anyone has any information?

 

Best regards, Andy

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I only know that i installed Leopard and set up TimeMachine to backup ONLY my home folder. By the time I did the fresh install, the home folder was like 100mb big. The resulting backup folder was !!! 6 !!! gb

 

I can't explain it ;)

And about hte unlimited space.. it'd be nice to have unlimited .mac idisk space for this, but seeing how broadband is limited to 1mbps upload speed average, using .mac with time machine is highly unrealistic

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It shouldn't take up that much space to backup. Sure, your documents might change frequenlly, but system files, applications, music, and videos aren't going to need to be backed up everyday. Time Machine will only recopy the files to the hard drive that have changed since the last backup. This will mean that the first backup will be large, but all the backups after that should be a lot smaller.

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No, you keep your porno in a blacklisted folder in time machine marked "Do Not Back Up". Plus, if you have Leopard lock your System Preferences window, then they would not even be able to see that a folder is not being backed up without doing something really creative like an "ls -liaR / > /Users/temp/files.orig && ls -liaR /Volumes/TimeMachine > /Users/temp/files.back && grep -v `cat /Users/temp/files.orig` /Users/temp/files.back > /Users/temp/files.changed".

 

Either way, external hard drives are your friend. I keep all my "sensitive" stuff on my iPod formatted to work as a normal hard disk (no music, but 60GB of encrypted safety).

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