Mac Users: Tell Me About Time Machine

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve looked on Apple’s page and Apple’s forum. Apple’s forum is not structured as nicely as the SDMB! Anyway, please tell me:

  1. Does Time Machine (ie, TM) require a dedicated external hard drive? Or, can I use just one external hard drive for both TM and to store files of my choosing?

  2. If TM shares an external hard drive, will it take space, wherever it can find it, even if it must overwrite my personal files? …Or, should I simply avoid this potential issue by using a dedicated external hard drive for TM?

3, Last, if my internal hard drive acts wonky or (at worst) crashes, how easy is it to revert to the last saved back-up file?

Thanks!

2

  1. Not necessarily. You could even partition your main internal drive and use that, but it won’t like it. Any external drive should work, and you can still use the remaining space for whatever.

  2. If your external TM drive is larger than the drive it’s backing up, you shouldn’t have any issue. TM will not eat any used space, but it will use up all available space if it needs it. There is a certain point the system will warn you you’re running out of space and must either transfer everything to a larger drive, or you can actually spread the backup between multiple drives, but I would advise against doing that.

  3. Using Time Machine is incredibly easy. When you open it, it’s basically just a stack of dated Finder windows that’s basically a snapshot of your computer from that time and date. You can just drag and drop whatever you need from it back onto your active desktop, or if need be you can restore your entire system using Recovery Mode. Once you go into RM, the first option should be “Restore from Time Machine backup.” It’s near one-click restoration of your entire system.

3

Time machine will use whatever space it can find on an external drive.
So, you can store files on the same drive that Time Machine is using to do backups. But, you should really think clearly about what you are doing in that case - do you expect Time Machine to back up those files that are stored on it’s backup volume? It won’t (without a lot of messing around), which means you have files that are not backed up.

Drives are dirt cheap. Just dedicated one to your backups.

4

Oh, and - it won’t delete files that are not in the backup, if you decide to do this.