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chiappa

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 29, 2008
5
0
On a Macbook Air with 256 GB of storage, which is quite often used near it's capacity..

How feasible is using a 500 GB drive for Time Machine backups?

I'm not that interested in keeping a history of backups. Just one that saves the day in case something happens to the laptop, is enough, I would imagine..? What are the cons of a smaller backup drive?

Pros being cheaper external storage of course :)
 

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,489
16,217
California
500GB will work just fine. If it starts to get full, TM will just purge off the oldest backups. If you are not too concerned about having a lot of old file versions saved like you said, there will be no problem.
 

IHelpId10t5

macrumors 6502
Nov 28, 2014
486
348
500 GB should be fine unless you are frequently adding or changing a bunch of really large files on the MBA drive.
 

JOSmith99

macrumors member
May 31, 2016
37
2
On a Macbook Air with 256 GB of storage, which is quite often used near it's capacity..

How feasible is using a 500 GB drive for Time Machine backups?

I'm not that interested in keeping a history of backups. Just one that saves the day in case something happens to the laptop, is enough, I would imagine..? What are the cons of a smaller backup drive?

Pros being cheaper external storage of course :)
Is a lot of the capacity taken up by iTunes content? If it is, or it is something else that is also stored in the cloud, I suggest you exclude it from the backup to save space in the backup (since you can always re-download iTunes purchases). Still, it will probably be fine either way, since time machine only saves changes after the first backup.
 
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