Time Machine help

I thought Time Machine would just start dropping the oldest days and recording the newest days automatically.

Am I missing something ?
I too thought TM would only back up new or changed files , not make 10 copies of the same file ? Is that whats happening

I've had some success by simply deselecting the backup volume and then re-selecting it in the TM pref panel.

As I understand it, Carp, I could have a file called "Ethel's Vacation Plans" and it gets backed up every day for say 30 days if that is what I have room for on my TM backup drive.

So I have 30 copies of Ethel's Vacation Plans and I could get the original one back or the one I revised 3 days ago.

I use TM but damned if I could find much information about using it. I've looked everywhere and even Apple's docs don't really give you much information.

I think that makes sense. Let me ask this: If I started my document Ethel's Vacation 30 days ago and made revisions every day for the next 30 days, would I have the document 30 times so that I could just get say the document with the fifth day's revisions on it and not the next 25 days?

If your original Ethels Vacation documents is 100 megs and you make 1 meg changes for the next 30 days - the files size should be 130 megs give or take for what was deleted

Now if TM is giving you a over 3 gigs for that document over the 30 days then that is totally wrong

Still if you have a 100M file and you change the word ahhh from "" they to theirs" TM should not back up the whole 100M file , rather link and time stamp the change back to the original

Wow!
Learning so much, you guys rock!
Reboot is the MAN!!!

Everything I know about TM that I didn't learn here, I got from the Missing Manual (Leopard). I swear by those books, love 'em, never regretted a dime spent.

Anyway, kate, the Missing Manuals kick ass.

I just checked my TM to see how far back I could go.
I can still resurrect files from Oct. 29, 2008!
Which happens to be the date I bought my iMac. It's a miracle.
There are a lot of folders I don't feel the need to backup, so my 500GB external is only 320 full.
It is truly FM.

Was thinking something like Photoshop layers but like you said cannot be done

Why don't you just set TM to auto delete backups as the drive fills up?

You can still set it that way.. even if you use the drive for other stuff besides TM backups.
TM will still know when your drive is full.


I think this is correct... check it out.

You are correct.

Oh.. I know it's correct. I was just making an attempt at sounding humble.

RE: cool TM stuff

Or, you can simply modify the correct .plist file: (copy/paste from my post over at MM)

Quote:
The system is certainly easy to configure, but it’s just too simple. After reading a hint at http://www.macfixit.com, I did some hunting around the typically forbidden areas of my hard drive, which yielded some property lists stored in System/Library/LaunchDaemons: com.apple.backupd.plist; com.apple.backupd-auto.plist; com.apple.backupd-wake.plist; and com.apple.backupd-attach.plist. These files can be opened in TextEdit (in your Applications folder), and for my purposes I wanted simply to change the backup interval to every 24 hours. If you open com.apple.backupd-auto.plist in TextEdit, you’ll see this:

{?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?}
{!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"}
{plist version="1.0"}
{dict}
{key}Label{/key}
{string}com.apple.backupd-auto{/string}
{key}ProgramArguments{/key}
{array}
{string}/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper{/string}
{string}-auto{/string}
{/array}
{key}StartInterval{/key}
{integer}3600{/integer}
{key}RunAtLoad{/key}
{false/}
{key}KeepAlive{/key}
{false/}
{/dict}
{/plist}

To change the interval to every twenty four hours, change the {integer}3600{/integer} line to {integer}86400{/integer} and save the file. The value in that line is the number of seconds between backups. 3600 seconds is one hours, 86400 seconds is one day. Simply save that file, log out, log back in, and you’re all set.


NOTE: the {} = <> and the bolding is mine.

I think I'm going to set both computers to every 12 hours. I did set both my G4 and my wife's Mini to 12 hour intervals. I had to give myself read/write permissions on the LaunchDaemons folder in order to save the changed file, and it requires a reboot (not log out/log in) as stated. The TM PrefPane still shows the hourly backups, but simply doesn't execute them.