I just installed leopard and would like to install Time Machine but need to decide on what size disk to get. I would like to get something that will last for awhile. But I think that time machine uses the entire volume for backup purposes. So is it a good idea to make to mountable volumes on one physical drive?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-John

But I think that time machine uses the entire volume for backup purposes.

Time Machine does not use the entire drive, in fact it seems to use a scheme that is similar to the one Backup uses.


So is it a good idea to make to mountable volumes on one physical drive?
This is not necessary since you can format a single drive, and Time Machine will make a directory which it will back up to.

I ended up using a 750GB Drive ($199 @ Costco), seems to work.

-John

A couple of initial comments on Time Machine.

It is very slow, it has been running for an hour on a USB 2.0 drive, and it has only backed up 2.7 GB, when I did drive test and copied a 33 GB folder over it took around 25 minutes.

Second comment is that I wish Time Machine had more options

• I would like to be able to tell it to start a back up now, especially for the first one


• It would be nice to set a total disk space usage, for example use 500GB


• More control if you want it is always good.

-John

Leopard Time Machine Slowness progress

So I found out that turning Norton Antivirus (or other virus) software off or at least turning Automatic Repair and Scan Compressed files to off, seems to make Time Machine Run Faster. I have turned that off and restarted time machine in the last hour it has done 4 GB. It still means that the whole backup is going to take 30 hours or so. But that is much faster than only doing 10 GB in 10 hours or so.

It seems that the root of the problem is that Time Machine looks at the files several times before writing them, when the Antivirus protection is on, every time it is read the antivirus software does a check, which is why it is so slow.

-John

Time Machine Slowness.

Here is a link from Symantec, that will provide more flexibility on the Norton Preferences Page.
http://service1.symantec.com/Support/num.nsf/docid/2007102922255911?Open&docid=2007102700270911&nsf=num.nsf&view=docid&seg=hm&lg=en&ct=us

-John