Hi Severin, As you are probable aware if your read my Backup Strategy-"Don't Scream ... Backup", I don't use Time Machine in my backup strategy. Because I don't use it doesn't mean it is not a good backup program to use, it's just that I prefer my backup strategy, it works for me ;-)
On 01/12/2009, at 10:58 PM, Severin Crisp wrote: > > What is the best strategy when a Time Machine disk is full? If you do run out of space, the best thing to do is to attach a new backup disk. After you attach the new disk, open Time Machine preferences and click Change Disk to choose it as your Time Machine backup disk. > I get the message that earlier backups have been deleted to make room but > this seems untidy. Is there a way for example to save just the most recent > month? From the disk, the earlier saves are dated but I suspect that trying > to delete them will not be successful. Open time Machine. Go to the top level -- the first window; the one with your hard drive. Navigate to the backup you want to delete and use the Actions menu (gear icon) in the Finder's toolbar. It has an option to delete the backup. Also, when using the Actions menu, with a file or folder selected, there is an option to delete all instances of the file/folder from all backups. As long as there is a single link to the original file in one of the later backups, that file is maintained. Once the last link to that file is deleted, then the disk space is freed. So deleting the oldest backup is perfectly safe, and is exactly what Time Machine does when it deletes the oldest. There is no problem with doing it yourself, you won't damage the integrity of the backup volume, except you'll recover a lot less space than you'd probably expect. You can choose any number of backups to delete but be patient it takes a while to extract the files and complete the process. However, its just as easy to let Time Machine delete them when required. It'll do that for you automatically as you have already found out. <http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427> > In addition to Time Machine I run periodic SuperDuper clones so could just > wipe the Time Machine disk and start again but that is clumsy to my mind. > Has anyone else worried about this? Yes, it's one reason why I don't use Time Machine in my backup strategy. I would use Time Machine if it had maintenance options where the backup files could be compressed and archived. Meaning that once this option was selected, it would compress all the many backup files into one without losing or deleting any files and then compress the file so that it can be archived. Cheers, Ronni 17" MacBook Pro Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz / 4GB / 800MHz / 500GB OS X 10.6.2 Snow Leopard Windows 7 Ultimate (under sufferance) -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:[email protected]>
