When I buy new drives for use with my Apple kit there is usually a prompt to ask if I want to use the drive for TM. If I don't I just carry on without authorising it. OTOH, if I decide to allow Mac OS X to use the drive for TM, is there anything so special about the drive that I have to keep it in that way until I decide I no longer want that drive to be used with TM?
For example, could I back off the files to another drive (using simple copies), and then reclaim the drive, with the option of reversing the process later if needed? The reasons for this are that I would normally allocate a much larger drive for TM use than is strictly needed for backup snapshots, and then if the TM backup files are not needed in the short term, that's pretty much a waste of a drive.
I recently had to take one of the family laptops in for repair, and I followed the recommended procedure to do at least a TM backup before it went in, but I used a rather large drive which was newly purchased for another purpose at the time. Having a 3 Tbyte drive which only has about 60 Gbytes (maybe less!) of data on it doesn't seem to make sense to me. I'm reluctant to reformat the drive yet though, in case the owner of the machine wants any of the files to be recovered, but if I could move the files onto a much smaller drive, or even a large memory stick, that would save a lot of space and be more economical.
One other thing I did while the repair was being carried out - which was very quick - was to change the password. I did remember to change it back afterwards. It would be quite easy to forget to do that.
For example, could I back off the files to another drive (using simple copies), and then reclaim the drive, with the option of reversing the process later if needed? The reasons for this are that I would normally allocate a much larger drive for TM use than is strictly needed for backup snapshots, and then if the TM backup files are not needed in the short term, that's pretty much a waste of a drive.
I recently had to take one of the family laptops in for repair, and I followed the recommended procedure to do at least a TM backup before it went in, but I used a rather large drive which was newly purchased for another purpose at the time. Having a 3 Tbyte drive which only has about 60 Gbytes (maybe less!) of data on it doesn't seem to make sense to me. I'm reluctant to reformat the drive yet though, in case the owner of the machine wants any of the files to be recovered, but if I could move the files onto a much smaller drive, or even a large memory stick, that would save a lot of space and be more economical.
One other thing I did while the repair was being carried out - which was very quick - was to change the password. I did remember to change it back afterwards. It would be quite easy to forget to do that.
Comment