Time Machine – How Much Space to Reserve for Backups on macOS

backupmacmacostime-machine

I'm quite new to the whole Mac OS X and all of its services. I have my MacBook Pro now for about 3 months. What I wanted to do now is to setup automatic backups using the Time Machine. The situation is that I have an external HD with 320 GB of space. I'd like to partition that, since I'd like to reserve some partition for being used from Windows OS (for my other family members) and the other partition for doing the backups using Time Machine.

My question now is how much space you would (at least) reserve for your Time Machine backups? The system I'd like to back-up is my MacBook Pro notebook with a HD of 320 GB. Of course I cannot backup the whole (full) system (unless I use the 100% space of my ext. HD.

I just wanted to hear the opinion of some of you, who are already using Time Machine.

Thx

Best Answer

Of course it'll be best if you can get a big hard disk to use Time Machine effectively - however from your question, I am assuming that you have your reasons to not be able to get it.

In this case, I would recommend you to NOT use Time Machine, and manually backup. There are a couple of reasons for this :

  1. You can selectively choose to backup only the most important data
  2. The hard disk can be a single partition, and space can be effectively used.

If you have to use Time Machine no matter what, then I recommend you do this (if I read your question correctly):

  1. Set aside 30GB for that Windows-use partition - That way you can use FAT32, and both Windows and Mac can write to it. It need not be large because I am assuming you are using it to transfer data from your Windows machine to Mac.
  2. Dedicate the rest for Time Machine.

And please, have another TM backup disk once you are able to do so.

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