Earlier today I bought a Maxtor OneTouch 4 500 GB external drive. I have a LaCie external, but it is smaller than the hard drive of my MacBook so I needed a little more juice than that. My original plan was to plug it in, make a bootable Super Duper backup and then proceed. However, when I plugged it in for the first time I got a dialog that asked me if I wanted to use this drive as the target for my Time Machine backups. I said yes and then it took off. This was quite a bit simpler and easier than I was expecting it to be. For some reason I thought Time Machine only worked with the Apple Time Capsule hardware so this was a pleasant surprise.
The main goals of this endeavor are to get my LaCie data migrated off so I can give it and my old iBook to my wife. The second is so that I can feel comfortable setting up Boot Camp and XP on this laptop. The goal of that is to see if I can once and for all get City Of Heroes running on this machine. Thus far it has failed on both VMWare Fusion and Parallels. Since VMWare can use BootCamp partitions, after I get this set up I will delete my existing VM partition and reclaim some space that way.
Mostly I’m happy that going into this long holiday weekend, the first task I attempted on my long list of things to do was actually significantly easier with a better result than I was shooting for. Here’s hoping to a bunch more like that.
So exactly how big is your Macbook drive? I’ve got a 120GB in my Pro and seriously need to upgrade it.
Read your tweets about the XP trouble. I used this site to do the CD (http://www.howtohaven.com/system/slipstream-xp-service-pack-3.shtml) and it worked fine, and no need to use Nero. Sorry it was no good. Any idea why?
Glad you got the Time Machine backup going anyway.
My black MacBook has a 250 GB drive. I’m a little curious how Time Machine reclaims space. I dumped almost everything from the old external back on the MacBook and then did the first Time Machine backup. If I delete 50 GB of data, at what point does that space get reclaimed from the TM repository? I’d guess that it is when the oldest backup containing the now gone files rolls out from lack of space, but conceivably the other answer could be “never.”
I think it uses the drive till it gets to a certain level then starts deleting old data. What that level is I dont know. So yeah depending on the drive space, it could be never.
There is probably a tools out there to purge old Time Machine data I would think, or a way to reset the database.
I would think city of heroes should work with bootcamp. I was able to get WOW to run on it just fine. If you do get city of heroes going let me know, I have heard good things and might give it a try.
Time Machine uses hard links to save space with incremental backups, and as listed in the System Preferences pane it will keep weekly backups until the drive is full. It automatically deletes the oldest when necessary (with an optional warning). I’m using both Time Machine and SuperDuper though, restoring from TM takes 2-3 hours on a 30gb drive!
If you want to find large files that are only backed up once, this patch to GrandPerspective will fix you up:
http://db.tidbits.com/article/9597
Re City of Heroes – have you tried Crossover Games? It’s one of the professional wine ports, I haven’t tried it myself (my mac doesn’t have a 3D card) but CoH is listed.
http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/group/?app_parent=4100