HT201250: Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac
Learn about Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac
-
All replies
-
Helpful answers
-
Feb 13, 2012 5:05 AM in response to BungaEMby MrHoffman,Five gigabytes of disk space is far below what should be maintained for disk free space.
I'd strive for five to maybe ten percent of the total disk capacity, maintained as free space.
Time Machine is good for backups, but it's not a particularly viable strategy for long-term off-loading of photos or other valued files from an overloaded disk. It would be far too easy to have your saved data "pruned" (deleted) if you lose track of it in the TM archives over time.
Get yourself a couple of external USB disks, and use those as external storage for your off-loaded files, and as a way to make copies of your important data. Or see if a local shop is willing to upgrade your internal disk to something larger. Or both.
If you have a higher-bandwidth network connection available, then hosted ("cloud") storage might also be an option. But that's a reoccuring monthly or yearly cost to maintain that.
To paraphrase: ten pounds of "stuff" just doesn't fit in a five-pound bag. You need more disk space, or less "stuff", or both.