To elaborate on #1 and #2:
You can use any external hard drive and TimeMachine will keep adding
incremental backups until the drive is full and then delete the oldest
one first. Actually it's a little more elaborate than that. From Wikipedia:
Time Machine saves hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups
for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month
until the volume runs out of space. At that point, Time Machine deletes
the oldest weekly backup.
You don't want to share this drive with TimeMachine for anything else
because Time Machine eventually consumes all available space, like a big
black hole :)
So along those lines, time machine is a regular Mac formatted disk so
you could set up just a partition for it to operate on and use the rest
of the drive space for something else. I actually have a second Mac as
my time machine backup drive. I have a 2TB drive in the remote machine
with a 1TB partition. I then share that with file sharing and then mount
that on my laptop and point to the network volume with Time machine.
When TimeMachine kicks off for the hourly backup it just mounts up that
drive and does its thing. When I'm away from my desk time machine just
fails but will try again when I'm back.
CB
On 2/3/12 3:23 PM, Scott Howell wrote:
Alex answers follow below:
On Feb 3, 2012, at 1:50 PM, Alex Hall wrote:
1. Will any external hard drive work?
ALex you may use any external drive you like. However, you should ensure you
have of course sufficient capacity and in fact you may consider having a drive
that is at least twice the capacity of the drive you are backing up. THis is
not a requirement, but a consideration.
2. Do I need to format it in a special way? If so, can I make a
partition on it to use for backups and leave the rest readable by
Windows computers?
I do not recall whether it matters, but the TIme Machine utility takes care of
this if I recall correctly. You could split the drive into multiple partitions
and choose where you want TIme Machine to place the backups.
3. Is time machine fully accessible?
I have not had any problems using TIme Machine.
4. Are time machine backups readable? That is, if I wanted a file off
an old backup but did not want to restore the whole thing, could I
just browse to that file and copy it like normal?
Yes.
5. Is anything not backed up?
The only files that come to mind which are not backed up are those that have no
impact on operation of your Mac. In other words these are files you do not have
direct access to and are only used by the current instance of the OS. So if you
restored the entire machine or cloned the drive you would not want these files.
6. If I had to restore, and I had newer files than in the backup, what
happens? In other words, is there a way to restore only system folders
so that files modified since the backup are not overwritten with older
versions?
Interesting question since I'm not sure how this condition would occur really.
I'm trying to invision a scenario that might apply in this case.
hth,
Thanks in advance.
--
Have a great day,
Alex (msg sent from GMail website)
mehg...@gmail.com; http://www.facebook.com/mehgcap
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