Reduce the size of my BackUp folder
 

I run backups on my machine weekly and save i to a 300GB external drive. The problem is, there is now less than 50GB left. Is there a way I can reduce the size of my backups - or compress the existing backups - delete them all together? |huh

Thanks in advance.

Is it a total back-up or incremental back-up? Do you need 300G of back-ups?

Hard drives are so so very cheap now, surely, just buy another one?

You can get 1TB drives for about 70 bucks.

I roll them over - FIFO - keep 5 and delete the eldest whenever I do a new one

Bingo. Or even better IMHO:

1. Yesterday. (most recent nightly)
2. Day before yesterday. (old nightly)
3. Last week. (nightly from seven days ago)
4. Last month. (recent nightly from the 1st of the month)

Optional:

5. Month before last. (Two months ago)
6. Three days ago.

These will more than take care of most situations! 90% of the time you'll just want the most recent nightly backup anyway.

It's too bad you are a Mac user, TimeMachine.

Get a bigger hard drive. :)

I'm using time machine with a 500gb and it's full. It cycle the old out with the new in the time line of things. I want more though.

bDok - that reminds me of Jaws : "I think we're gonna need a bigger boat..."



Yeah I just wanted to make sure I could delete the oldest ones nd leave the more recent ones without having an issue. Thanks for the feedback everyone.

If you end up throwing more money at the problem i suggest a hard drive dock something like this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817392022
This way you can just pop in a new drive anytime

We are going with carbonite.com
$129 gets you three years peace of mind :)

That looks pretty cool I might have to grab one !

Found this funny though

Kind of like how I feel about cloud servers...while one average person's computer may not be worth assembling a dedicated hacker team to crack, once you have thousands or millions of people storing their most sensitive data in one location it gets a lot more attractive as a target. I know there will all kinds of safeguards in place, but nothing is really 100% secure if you can dedicate enough resources to the problem. And that's without considering gaining access via disgruntled employees and other social engineering tactics.

Sleep well.

;)

I just want to know how well that works with the terabytes of data that I have. I guess you would spend about a month doing a full restore not to mention a few months doing the first backup.

Even with my fast N network I still take my drives off of the Airport and plug them into a Firewire port for doing a large restore or the initial backup.

Yeah, I've been using slide out HD trays for years. I'm always grabbing +500mB of sample data from one of my clients to take home for analysis or testing.

It's much easier to just pop into the office & grab the data to take home, then spening weeks at their office(out-of-town), or trying to play with through the VPN.

I like this one. Cost a little more but has Firewire too.

I keep one of these around for quickly being able to mount just about any bare drive.

LOL, Cleo do you still have about a dozen usb drives taped together? :)

Actually they are Firewire drives that are RAIDed for FoxyAngel. Some have been replaced with 1 TB MyBook Firewire drives stuck together with two sided tape that have also been RAIDed but probably the next time she needs one we will get one of these MyBook RAIDs.

That mybook is exactly what I have connected to the server for all our client computer backups here at the office (well actually I have the 2 Tb model with 1Tb drives in a raid)

Yeah the MyBook drives are great... and cheap too.

http://cleos-porn-links.com/blogpics...cam-server.jpg

It wasn't that long ago that a 250 gig drive was big, noisy and expensive. That is how we ended up with a bunch of them duct taped together forming, what at the time was, inexpensive RAIDs.

lol, that is the set up I was talking about ;)

Cleo looking at your pix with all those cables and wires makes me feel sane, everyone complains about the rats nest of cabling i keep but i keep telling them its normal :)