Time Machine Deleting Backups

[David K]

Just got back from Puerto Rico and found my new 2TB drive waiting for me. Popped it in, partitioned it and copied nearly 1TB of files to it overnight. What I forgot to do was to tell Time Machine to exclude the new drive from it's backups so now the remaining space on my DROBO (which is where Time Machine backs up) took a huge hit. Figured I'd delete a bunch of old backups (some from 2008) but couldn't remember how to do it properly. Couple of searches turned this up so I thought I'd share it with you guys. You can't simply go into Finder and delete from there... it screws up everything.

http://www.vimeo.com/3268578

 

[ddk]

Thanks for the link David, I know what to do when the time comes but I think that I have my time machine on auto erase.

 

[Jack]

David,

great link, and even better reminder to turn any/all newly installed drives "OFF" in TM if you don't want them auto backed-up!

 

[David K]

Thanks for the link David, I know what to do when the time comes but I think that I have my time machine on auto erase.

David, so do I but I think that only kicks in when you're getting really low on space. I'm using my Drobo as a manual backup for all my image files as well as the time machine backup. I've excluded the drives where I store my image files from the TM backup... just forgot to add the new drive to the excluded list.

Jack,

Exactly...

 

[ddk]

David, so do I but I think that only kicks in when you're getting really low on space. I'm using my Drobo as a manual backup for all my image files as well as the time machine backup. I've excluded the drives where I store my image files from the TM backup... just forgot to add the new drive to the excluded list.

I see, don't you think that backing up with TM to an ever expanding Drobo will be a drain of your resources? Or do you actually need to go back more than three months?

 

[Guy Mancuso]

Great tip there and never knew of that

 

[David K]

I see, don't you think that backing up with TM to an ever expanding Drobo will be a drain of your resources? Or do you actually need to go back more than three months?

To be honest, I didn't think much about it when I selected the Drobo as the target disk for backups. I'm in the process of changing that now as I certainly don't need the backups I appear to have from 2008

 

[Jorgen Udvang]

Slightly OT, but I'm still on 10.4: Does TM create a bootable backup?

 

[ddk]

Not that I know of, but you can install Mac OS on a new disc and import all your data from TM backups.

I don't know what software you have on your computer but with HU you lose some functionality if you upgrade to 10.5 or higher. The conversion modules work but your markers and crop tool doesn't. Also if you have older printer software they might not work either.

 

[Jorgen Udvang]

Not that I know of, but you can install Mac OS on a new disc and import all your data from TM backups.

I don't know what software you have on your computer but with HU you lose some functionality if you upgrade to 10.5 or higher. The conversion modules work but your markers and crop tool doesn't. Also if you have older printer software they might not work either.

Thank you for the information, David. I'll keep my Mini with 10.4 when I upgrade. I use Carbon Copy Cloner for backup btw., which means that I always have an exact, bootable copy of my system disk available. If the old disk crashes, I just reboot from the backup and copy it to a new disk. The whole process takes around 20 minutes, and not a single bit is lost, as long as the backup is relatively current

Anybody want to hear about me spending the entire day last Sunday, trying to recover at list a few fragments of user data after my father crashed his Windows system? No? I thought so

 

[ddk]

Does CC give you incremental backups that you can go back in time and recover particular data?

Frankly besides TM and losing some of my software and print drivers I didn't see any difference between 10.4 and 10.5 operationally, in time we'll see the benefits or downside of Snow Leopard...

 

[Jorgen Udvang]

Does CC give you incremental backups that you can go back in time and recover particular data?

No, that's the disadvantage, so I might use both when I upgrade to the snow thing. Disks are cheap, and there ain't no such thing as too much backup.

 

[ddk]

No, that's the disadvantage, so I might use both when I upgrade to the snow thing. Disks are cheap, and there ain't no such thing as too much backup.

TM is great for backing up your drive but I don't recommend for images, specially since it starts deleting older data once the disk is full. Also finding individual images in your backups is going to be very difficult, you're going to need something like Chronosync for your image files.

 

[ddk]

Jorgen, I stand corrected TM backup is bootable. I tried it but not everything was right, so I'm making a new TM backup to see if it has the same bugs or not.

 

[David K]

Just a follow up on my earlier post. Deleting backups one by one was so time consuming I gave up on it. I chose another drive (500gb) for my time machine backups and did a new backup. Took about 145GB total. Then I deleted my backup folder from the Drobo in it's entirety. That process took overnight to complete itself but here's the wierd part. It freed up over 600 GB of space on my Drobo. Don't really understand this since as I was deleting the individual backups they did not seem to be large files at all.