Limiting Time Machine backup size on NAS
Monday, May 6. 2013
Earlier I wrote about getting a Linux-based NAS-box to host Apple Time Machine backups.
I was reviewing my settings on the Mac and realized the text in the Time Machine:
Well... I have lots of disk space there. Not all of it is can be taken by my Mac's backups, so ... Something needed to be done.
I mounted the AFP-share and confirmed the max size of my sparsebundle:
hdiutil imageinfo Mac\ mini.sparsebundle/
It said (unsurprisingly):
Size Information:
Total Bytes: 8855484092416
That is 8+ TiB!! Oh my! There is no way that I can afford to have that much of Apple backups. Luckily there is a way to reduce the size:
hdiutil resize -size 500g -shrinkonly Mac\ mini.sparsebundle/
Now checking the size will yield something reasonable (500 GiB):
Size Information:
Total Bytes: 537214885888
That is something, that I can easily accept.
The information came from:
- http://untoro.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/how-to-limit-space-used-by-time-machine/
- http://nikhilhaas.com/blog/limit-size-of-time-machine-backup-on-wd-my-book-live/
Also I did this to limit the size. I have no idea if it actually does anything.
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine MaxSize 405600
Perhaps somebody can comment this.
