- External drive for mac should i do time machine how to#
- External drive for mac should i do time machine pro#
- External drive for mac should i do time machine plus#
This step can take a while if you already have a Time Machine backup on the drive, as there are a huge number of files that are checked.
External drive for mac should i do time machine plus#
Disk Utility verifies the disk and the file system, checks the existing Journaled HFS Plus volume, and then checks the catalog file. Be sure to give the Partition a name – in this example, “My Stuff” – and choose the format, which should usually remain OS X Extended (Journaled).
To size the drive to the proper capacity, either move the dot around the circumference of the circle until you see the desired capacity in the “Size” field, or type the capacity into that field. Now sadly, this test drive doesn’t have a lot of space available, so we’ll just make a 150GB (.15TB) partition to put files into. To add a second partition for data storage, click on the + icon below the circle that represents the total storage available on the drive. The easy way? Type Command-Space to bring up your Spotlight search window, type in Disk Utility, and then press the Return key (see image below)… There are a couple of ways you can do this first is to dig around in your Applications folder until you find the Utilities folder, then double-click that Disk Utility icon.
External drive for mac should i do time machine pro#
That 6TB Mercury Elite Pro drive? Split it up into a 4TB partition for Time Machine and a 2TB place for your big files, and you’ve got it made.
There’s an advantage to partitioning the drive into separate Time Machine and file storage partitions – Time Machine will only expand to fill its partition, leaving plenty of space for file storage in the other partition. It doesn’t take up a lot of storage, so partitioning a drive into two or more individual drive spaces doesn’t infringe on the Recovery Partition. The Recovery Partition is hidden from view, even when you use the Disk Utility (found in the Applications > Utilities folder) app to view what’s on the drive. The latter is what you can use to restore a bad OS X installation by holding down Command+R while rebooting the Mac. Usually, Mac drives come from plants in China, California, or Texas with more than one partition or space – the default drive partition and what’s called a Recovery Partition.
External drive for mac should i do time machine how to#
The secret word for how to do this is partitioning.
Or you can consider another idea – using that space for your Time Machine backup and as a place to store all those big video files you’re working on. If your Mac has even a 2TB drive built-in, you could use all of that spacious drive for Time Machine backups for a long, long time. For example, the OWC Mercury Elite Pro in a 6TB configuration with fast USB 3.0 connectivity is just $367.99 as of this publication date. We’ve mentioned before just how inexpensive large capacity hard disk drives are getting. Instead, you can create a separate folder and give it an original name like “Files” and put it next to the backups.backupdb folder on your drive (see image below). Why? Because Time Machine is constantly and voraciously eating space on your backup drive, and it could erase those files if they’re inside backups.backupdb. You DO NOT want to put any of your extra file storage into backups.backupdb.
For those situations where there’s just one backup drive connected to one Mac, there will be one folder inside backups.backupdb with the name of your Mac on it (i.e., “Bob’s iMac”). That folder contains a folder for each Mac that’s using the drive as a backup drive, so if you’re sharing the drive by connecting it to an Apple AirPort Wi-Fi router, you’ll find multiple folders inside it. Time Machine saves all of the backups for your Mac in a deceptively innocuous folder on your backup drive named backups.backupdb. For the final post this month about the important topic of backups, we’ll take a look at how one drive can be used for both Time Machine backups and for storing your files.įirst, we’ll look at an easy way to do the job, then look at a more complex method that essentially turns your one backup drive into two drives. We also talked about creating bootable backups as a way to get your Mac up and running quickly in the case of a primary drive failure and provided three ways to back up your iOS devices.
0 kommentar(er)
