Ok, Thanks Barry, My data is safe so that is ok, I use a Scheduled Chronosync every night to a NAS box in the attic. So anything else although a lot of work agro, will not be a data loss issue.
Thanks donv. I had seen the Startup disk option in Sys Prefs, but was not sure if it was a 'once only' change or was a permanent Startup disk selection.
RC-R....I' did not elaborate further as it was not strictly related to what i was asking, but here are the answers/reasons.
R C-R wrote:
Could you explain more about this? What do you mean by the trash can not emptying "properly"?
What I mean is that although the trash icon showed empty and with Hidden files and folders set to 'Show' in Finder, nothing appeared in the Trash Can or in the .trashes folder in Finder. BUT JDiskReport showed the trash can as having something like 300GB that could not be deleted. ( a duplicate iTunes folder i created before doing some major pruning of music stored in iTunes) Even using ls with various options from the Terminal failed to show the stuck folder in the Trash. See my post about this that no one could help me with:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2190196&tstart=0
Where were you seeing Time Machine report that each backup was 500 GB? If you were just looking at the size of the dated >Time Machine backup folders via Finder or Terminal, you were not seeing an accurate indication of backup size: while it >appears that each dated backup contains a copy of every file relevant to that date, there is actually only one version of each >unique file on the Time Machine drive.
What I was seeing was Time machine reporting not being able to complete another backup, as there was not enough space left on the drive. I clicked on the TM icon in the dock, and saw that instead of having backups going back many months, I only had one backup from the previous hour. If I looked at the TM drive in Finder, it showed just the one dated backup subfolder within the backup.backupdb folder and that was over 700GB
I understand how TM does its backups using 'hardlinks' . I use a similar system on my FreeNAS backup box using a script and rsync to create a rotating 'snapshot' style backup up of the old Dell PC. So yes , if you looked at the size of each individual backup and added them all together, then you would have backups totalling a figure much greater than would be possible to fit on the drive
For the first few months Time Machine was fine until the drive started getting full and every hour or so when TM did a backup it was asking me about deleting older backups. So I turned off the 'Notify after old backups are deleted' option.
Each individual backup had got so big with the stuck folder in .Trashes that all previous backups had been deleted.
Now, I thought .trashes folders were automatically excluded from TM backups, but it seems in this case that they were somehow being included, and the deleted iTunes library folder was somehow stuck in there and being backed up.
How specifically have you moved & linked your user home folder to a non-startup drive? This may be part of your problem.
I will start from the beginning.
When I first got the machine I had 4 HDD's ( set up as Boot 500gb, Video Scratch1Tb, Video import1TB and Time machine1TB).
With the way iPhoto/iTunes etc imports data into their own packages (OK I know that can be stopped and use linked libraries) my Users folders on the boot drive started to outgrow the drive. I use ALAC (lossless format ) for my music, and have a lot 20,00+ photos. A 500 Gb drive with about 350-400 gb user data plus system.
So I copied the User folders to one of the bigger drives. Then linked to it using Sys Preferences, CMD Click User/Advanced options/Home Directory/Choose.
On any Ubuntu machines I have setup, putting the home folder on a separate drive has not caused me problems, so I possibly naively assumed this would also be the case on here also. On Windows machine I alway sset up the My Documents folders on a independent drive, but then the My Docs folder does no contain "system' data in the same way that a users home folder does, so that is a lot less troublesome.
Am thinking of upgrading the drives in this box soon, just waiting on the prices of the 2TB WD Caviar Blacks to drop a bit. I can then move the 3 1TB drives out of this machine into my FreeNAS backup box.
I think I have covered all your points there, any suggestions appreciated
Neil
