My 13" MacBook Pro has 500GB internal hard drive space, and I bought a 1TB external HDD to use as my Time Machine backup. I only read from many articles that the backup should be about 2 to 3 times the size of my hard drive, but I feel like 1TB will never be filled up, and in fact, leave a lot of free space.
I understand that Time Machine takes a snapshot of my whole system and stores it in the backup drive. But say, for example, only about 120GB of my internal HDD is in use. Then it'll only take a snapshot that's about 120GB in size, and while that same snapshot will grow over time as I take more recent snapshots of my system, it will never go beyond 500GB because that's the maximum size of my internal HDD. Or do I have it wrong? How does Time Machine work, really?
I'm asking this because I want to know if I should use a separate external HDD for storing my actual files.
Best Answer
You probably want to check out this website for the most information, but here is the answer to your question, quoted from the website above:
1. How big a drive do I need for Time Machine?
My Answer
No, not quite. The 1 TB hard drive will be filled up because Time Machine keeps your backups and deletes them once your hard drive is filled. There is more than one backup stored on that hard drive. As stuffe pointed out as well, Time Machine allows you to restore to a previous backup, since Time Machine may keep 7 or 8 backups on that 1 TB hard drive.
Yes, you should. You should be dedicating a drive to Time Machine. Here is the quoted answer from 3 in the website I linked above:
3. Can I use my Time Machine disk for other stuff?