Uh oh, after this backup I'll only have a few GB left on my Time Machine backup drive!

Well, that happened pretty quickly!  After upgrading the internal hard drive on my MacBook Pro to 320 GB, I moved the 120 GB disk Apple shipped with the machine to my Verbatim SmartDisk FireWire+USB enclosure to use as a Time Machine backup target.  Despite applying some tricks to reduce the amount of data backed up by Time Machine, I filled up the 120 GB drive pretty quickly indeed!  So I decided to swap the 160 GB drive from my Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini USB drive into the (faster) Verbatim FireWire enclosure to give Time Machine some (temporary) breathing room.

It turns out that you can move Time Machine backups easily, with included OS X tools, and without breaking anything.  My old backups are still visible, and I have another 40 GB to work with.  Read on for the details!

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I’ve been very pleased by Apple’s integrated backup application in OS X, Time Machine.  It cleverly removes many of the barriers to backup, and makes restore both simple and fun.  But I’ve noticed that it’s not quite perfect out of the box.  Two default settings in particular bother me:  It is set to back up everything, including OS files and caches, and spotlight needlessly indexes your Time Machine drive.  Luckily, both are easy fixes.

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Data Robotics today introduced the second generation of what I think of as a personal storage array, but although the Drobo 2 offers great enhancements, making it a top choice for those needing massive and protected storage on a single computer, it’s still not what I’m looking for in a home storage device.

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There has been lots of talk about the Data Robotics (aka Drobo) SOHO “storage robot”
- whoever they have doing their marketing deserves a raise! When I first heard about it, I was pretty puzzled - Why care about yet another storage enclosure, especially an overly expensive one that doesn’t even have NAS features? On closer examination, I have become a believer in the potential of the device and the company. Drobo offers some key ingredients that promise future success to me: a clear focus on usability, novel thinking to solve a real-world problem, and that great marketing I mentioned earlier. Click through for the full story… Continue Reading »