Time Machine disc space

[Johan_Elzenga]

Time Machine is not really meant for these kinds of systems. If you work on a Photoshop file, you don't need to backup hourly versions. I use a separate 1 TB disk for my photo library, which is cloned to another 1TB disk each day. Once a week it is cloned to a disk that I store off line. My internal drive is backed up using Time Machine. That works fine.

[Martin_Doudoroff]

Originally Posted by Johan_Elzenga

Time Machine is not really meant for these kinds of systems. If you work on a Photoshop file, you don't need to backup hourly versions.

Why not? Time Machine seems to me to be a reasonable hedge against both user error and hard drive failure, so why not let it back up Photoshop files-in-progress? It's basically the same thing I did for a couple years using ChronoSync.

(The one thing Time Machine does not seem (to me) suitable for is long-term archiving of photo libraries, which is by definition more a question of warehousing than that of preserving the integrity of an active system.)

[Jason_Hoss]

The value that I see in Time Machine, besides recovering single files. Is the ability to recover and rebuild my entire machine. Just think the time it takes to install all of your software, update it, then configure. Thats about half a days work for me, so this feature is warmly welcomed.

[AndrewRodney]

Originally Posted by Jason_Hoss

The value that I see in Time Machine, besides recovering single files. Is the ability to recover and rebuild my entire machine. Just think the time it takes to install all of your software, update it, then configure. Thats about half a days work for me, so this feature is warmly welcomed.

Actually it kind of sucks at that! Its far better for getting back a file you tossed a few days ago and now want back or a revision etc.

SuperDuper (or Carbon Copy Cloner) is far better at cloning your drive and allowing a fast and easy full recover. SuperDuper is preferred but its not Leopard ready, CCC is and its free too. But SuperDuper is well worth the money. You can have it clone (only new items to speed things up) via schedule. I have it do this every night, it doesn't take long to do (the Mac is set to automatically wake at 2am to do this, SuperDuper will sleep the machine when its done).

I use Time Machine and a clone utility. TM is great for getting back specific files (open the folder you wish to recover, launch TM and you get that series of iterations to grab). I absolutely would not use it to backup or restore an entire drive.

[Jason_Hoss]

Andrew,

Well I agree with your statements about CCC, I'll disagree about TM. I've had good luck with restoring an entire OS install from Time Machine. I also agree with your last statement about using two utilities for backup management. I am looking forward to the patch from apple to allow Time Machine to play nice with network drives. CCC is already leopard ready as I've also used that a few times in the past couple of days.

Carbon Copy Cloner Link:
CCC

[Johan_Elzenga]

I already have used Time Machine to restore an entire disk, and it works just as well as any clone program does. But because Time Machine makes incremental copies (and many of them the first day), it's not so great for huge files that change a lot during the day. Your disk will fill up quickly if you do backup such files every hour, and the question is why you would want to keep al those copies after the work on that file is done. That is why I always preferred to use a separate disk (and clone that once a day) for my photos.

[John_G_Walter]

I've been using Time Machine for about a month now, and REALLY love it.

When using a program like Aperture (or Lightroom) to manage process your images, the original file is never touched or updated, so there are no excessive copies created by Time Machine. The adjustments and metadata additions are a very small data load on the Library, and it is excluded from the Time Machine backup (currently recommended due to a known bug). I backup the entire library manually as needed, and that backup file is included in the Time Machine backup routine.

I find with Aperture (or Lightroom) that I don't even need to use Photoshop on about 75% of my work. Of course, when I do, Aperture creates a PSD file, and places it in the excluded library, so it stays out of the Time Machine routine. When I am finished with the PS file I simply relocate it from the Library to a permanent folder, where it then gets backed up.

Prior to Time Machine & Aperture, I used to move files around a lot as part of my regular workflow. This practice is really counterproductive to both TM and Aperture. Once I realized that, my Time Machine backup load was reduced.

My system consists of a MacPro with its small 250gb internal drive storing only system files, user files, and applications. I have a seperate Drobo (RAID 5 like device), currently with 4 500gb drive yielding a total of about 1.4 tb of primary storage. It currently has about 500gb of data.

The Drobo and the Mac's internal drives are backed up via Time Machine onto a 1 tb external HD. I imagine that I am going to run into some problems when the Drobo data load gets bigger, but that seems a ways off at the moment.

TM has used about 50% of the external so far, and as I understand it, it backs up every hour for a day, every day for a month, and then every week until the drive is full. Once the drive is full, it begins erasing the oldest first to make room for newer backups.

What I am not really sure of, and maybe somebody here knows, is what exactly it does when it switches from hourly to daily to weekly? Does it somehow combine all of the hourly backups into one daily backup, or does it just keep the one of the hourlys as a new daily?

[Pro Photo Store]

Visit the B&H Pro Photo Store for the best Gear Prices and regular specials!

Brilliant Color for any Digital SLR
White Balance Cap
The Pros Agree on ColorRight
What People Are Saying