make room on external hard drive time machine

Being able to “look back in time” for four or five years takes a tremendous amount of storage, but it’s worthwhile if you need to recover a file that you threw away back then.įor laptops with much less storage capacity – for example, the 512GB SSD-based MacBook Pro with Touch Bar – a 1TB backup drive would be sufficient.ģ) Buy an external drive with the capacity you need Why so much space? Well, Time Machine backups are constantly growing in size as time passes. Since hard drives and solid state drives rarely come in sizes like that, we’ll round up to 5TB. My 2.12TB Fusion Drive would, according to this rule of thumb, need a backup drive with at least 2.12 x 2 or 4.24TB of space.

We use a rule of thumb for backup drive capacity: have twice the amount of capacity in your backup drive that your Mac could theoretically use. While Documents and Photos are clearly marked, what are some of those other color stripes? Hover your cursor over each one to see what category - like iTunes, Apps, iOS files, etc… - is using up in your storage.Ģ) Multiply the current usage by two, then round up In the screenshot below, the 2.12TB Fusion Drive in my iMac has 1.12TB of available space. Your main storage drive and any attached external drives will appear, with a color coded stripe showing what’s taking up space on your drive. To find out how much space is available on your Mac’s internal storage, click the Apple menu, select About This Mac, and then click the tab marked “Storage”. Today, we start with those who aren’t yet backing up their Macs with a quick tutorial on using Time Machine to start constant backups.ġ) Determine the existing capacity of your Mac’s storage. Believe it or not, it’s already March 31 and that means it’s World Backup Day! World Backup Day is recognized every year and is a day for people to learn about the increasing role of data in our lives and the importance of regular backups.Īt the Rocket Yard, we take data backups very seriously and in April we’ll cover everything you need to know about backing up all of your digital life.

Make room on external hard drive time machine