watchdaa.blogg.se - Best external hd for time machine

Select Name, Format, and Size for the new Partition.Ģ. Note: Doing this will erase all drive content, so make sure you’re OK with that. For that, you turn a single hardware drive into two different volumes (or logical disks) and use one for Time Machine.

The idea here is to create a separate partition on the external drive and use that partition exclusively for Time Machine backup. Limit Time Machine backup size of an external drive Instead, you’ll need to limit the storage space at the destination side, be it the external drive you plug directly into your Mac or a Time Machine-supported NAS server.īy the way, since you make changes to the backup destination, this method will work on all macOS versions. If you run the latest macOS (10.13 Mojave or newer), the command above won’t take effect. Sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/ MaxSize Limit Time Machine backup size in all versions of macOS If you want to revert to the default value (no limit), run this command: And that’s it! From now on, Time Machine on that Mac will automatically delete old backups to make sure it uses no more than 300GB.

You’ll be likely prompted to enter your account’s password, so do that and press Enter again. Sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/ MaxSize 307200

Run Terminal (you can search for it using Spotlight at the top right corner).

So if you’re going to use 300GB, then the number you have is 307200 since 1GB = 1,024MB.

Convert the storage limited you want into megabytes.

Note that you need to log in with an administrator account. This trick is easy to implement and for sure works on macOS 10.12 (Sierra) and older versions. Limit Time Machine backup size in macOS 10.12 and earlier

The more storage space, the more versions of backups you’ll get, which means the further you can go back in time. So, for example, if your MacBook has 128GB of internal storage, 300GB of backup space is generous. Generally, you want to use 150% or more of your Mac’s internal drive capacity. (If you don’t know how, check out this post, which also gives you some other handy Mac skills, including how to run Terminal, which you’ll need to use in this post.)Īfter that, find out the amount of storage you need for the backups. Determine the OS version and suitable backup limitīefore you can fix Time Machine’s storage, you first need to determine what version of macOS you’re running. Creating a separate partition on your backup drive is the best way to control the amount of storage Time Machine will use.