Mac Time Machine Question..????
 

So Time Machine filled my terrabyte drive with (multiple?) backups of my 200 gig hard drive.

Should I delete the old backups and start fresh?

Will that mess with anything?

Bump for an excellent question. I'm just now trying to select a drive to use with Time Machine.

I have an external drive, not that much space, but i use it to backup the main drive in my mac with time machine. It got filled up the other day and i went into it and deleted the old backups (they're organized by date), it takes forever to get rid of that much data, but it doesn't seemed to of broken anything and i now have more space on that drive.

I'd disable time machine first tho for sure.

It should automatically handle it. This is from Apple's website:

Backing up to a full disk.
One day, no matter how large your backup drive is, it will run out of space. And Time Machine has an action plan. It alerts you that it will start deleting previous backups, oldest first. Before it deletes any backup, Time Machine copies files that might be needed to fully restore your disk for every remaining backup. (Moral of the story: The larger the drive, the farther back in time you can back up.)

No option inside the program to overwrite older copies?

Hmmm...I was hoping to use the drive for other things as well. I wonder if I can say, "Use 500 gigs of drive for backup" or whatever.

IIs better you delete!

You should be able to partition the back up disk using Disk Utility. Assign one part for backup and the other for storage.

Just create a partition and have it backup to that instead of the whole drive, then have another partition for whatever else you wanna put on there :thumbsup

EDIT - i see DateDoc has beat me to it

Yes. You can do this by partitioning the drive. See this and you'll get the gist of it.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread....79532&tstart=0

get a timecapsule .. i use it solely to back up the three macs in my house, external harddrives should be transfer and archive :)

Me too. I picked up a 1TB Time Capsule solely to back up too.

'

Can I partition after I've been using it? Or will it wipe the drive?

Preference Explanation

On and Off slider

Time Machine backs up your files every hour. To stop automatic backups, move the slider to Off. Automatic backups will resume when you turn Time Machine back on.

Change Disk

Click Change Disk to choose a disk or partition where Time Machine will keep your backups.

Options

To exclude items from being backed up, click Options.

DO NOT partition a drive you want to use for back ups. It is ASKING for trouble.

Hard drives are cheap as you like nowadays. I just got a 750 gig SATA for 80 USD.

I lost one year's worth of data once with a HDD fail, so now I have one ext with time machine back ups, and another one with a bootable SuperDuper mirror of my whole drive.

But to answer your question, time machine makes hourly back ups and then when your hard drive is full switches to weekly backups. So you just leave it alone basically and it manages your shit for you.

But don't partition a drive you rely on for back ups.

Helpful info. Thanks!

good info here, I'm gonna use that time machine for the very first time now :thumbsup