Help with Time Machine

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Level 2

199 points

Help with Time Machine

Although I have owned a mac for years, I only began using Time Machine a few months ago.

For the couple of weeks, I've been told my back up drive was full. Today, I got the message that the back up failed and that yesterday was the most recent back up. double-clicking on the back up drive, I see folders dating back to November. However, when I enter Time Machine, I can only scroll to yesterday.

So, a few questions.

1. Is the November folder really an existing back up? Why do I see it there but not in Time Machine?

2. I have several external Hard drives I can use for Time Machine and I am interested in getting someone to help me with the best possible solution to achieve my goal. Which is, to remove the 300gb of pictures I have on my internal hard drive to an external hard drive, while still backing up my internal hard drive and media hard drive to Time Machine.

I hope I can say this so it's not confusing.

I have a 500gb internal hd. Running 10.11.1 Because I have nearly 300gb of photos on the internal HD, I have only 6.66 gb space available.

I have 3 available external hard drives I can use for back up. 1tb I got for Christmas and is not being used for anything, and 2 500gb HDs...one of which is currently being used for Time Machine. The other has a back up I no longer need so can be erased.

Besides using Time Machine for back up, I also pay a monthly fee for Crash Plan. Although this backs up the folders in my home folder, it does not back up the OS. I can, however, point it to back up an external HD.

Finally, these are my questions. To free space on my internal HD, can (should) I move the photos off my internal HD (I don't use iphoto) and put them on an external HD and then have both my internal HD and HD with photos backed up with TM? Would it be best to transfer my photos to a 500gb HD, and then use the 1TB (without partitioning it) to backup both the internal and external HDs?

I hope what I'm asking makes sense. Thanks to anyone willing to take apart my ramblings and make sense of them for me.

Respectfully,

Cayleen

24" iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.6), 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Posted on Feb 9, 2016 12:38 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Király

Level 6

10,017 points

Feb 10, 2016 9:57 AM in response to Cayleen

What I do with my Mac sounds a lot like what you are asking to do with yours. I have:

-Photos and movies on an external drive (about 500GB used on a 2TB drive)

-The rest of my data on the internal drive (about 300GB used on a 1TB drive

-Both the internal and external backed up to a third drive (3TB) used for Time Machine.

It all works very well.

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Answer 2

Feb 10, 2016 9:58 AM in response to Cayleen

Cayleen wrote:

Although I have owned a mac for years, I only began using Time Machine a few months ago.

For the couple of weeks, I've been told my back up drive was full. Today, I got the message that the back up failed and that yesterday was the most recent back up. double-clicking on the back up drive, I see folders dating back to November. However, when I enter Time Machine, I can only scroll to yesterday.

So, a few questions.

1. Is the November folder really an existing back up? Why do I see it there but not in Time Machine?

You need a larger backup drive.

Yes. Time Machine makes incremental backups. The November folder contains files you haven't updated since November.

2. I have several external Hard drives I can use for Time Machine and I am interested in getting someone to help me with the best possible solution to achieve my goal. Which is, to remove the 300gb of pictures I have on my internal hard drive to an external hard drive, while still backing up my internal hard drive and media hard drive to Time Machine.

You should either get a separate drive for the pictures, or get a very large drive and partition it into 2 logical drives, one for Time Machine and one for your photos. The downside to the second approach is that you can't include your photos in the Time Machine backup. So use the 1 TB drive for TM, and one of the 500 GB drives for your photos. That way you can include the photo drive in your Time Machine backup. The TM drive has to be much larger than your internal drive, because it keeps multiple versions of files that have changed.

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