Time Machine and Media on same drive

[John Pale]

Don’t do it. You don’t want FCP and Time Machine writing to the same drive simultaneously. Will definitely affect performance.

Partitioning will not help. It’s still the same physical drive.

Get a second FW drive. They are cheap.

[Patrick Simpson]

I’m cheap too.

Can I schedule Time Machine to only backup at night or something? Maybe there are settings in Time Machine to avoid issues?

20″ intel iMac, 2.66 GHz, 4GB ram
View my reel – http://www.youtube.com/patrickdsimpson

[John Pale]

No. But you can turn Time Machine off while you edit.
Still don’t think its a good idea. you are putting lots of wear and tear on the drive you use to back up all your data. But if thats not important to you, by all means.

[Scott Sheriff]

Don’t waste a FW drive on Time Machine if you are cheap. Total overkill. Go get a USB ‘My Book’ for Time Machine, and use the FW for just for media.
I think it is bad mojo to co-mingle system and media on the same drive.

[Patrick Simpson]

Thanks for the info, it helps a lot.

How much space do I need for Time Machine? I suppose this varies a lot; I have a 300 GB system drive with probably 80 GB of data that I’d actually back up.

20″ intel iMac, 2.66 GHz, 4GB ram
View my reel – http://www.youtube.com/patrickdsimpson

[Scott Sheriff]

IMHO
I think it should be as large as your system drive, so I would go for a 500mb, if they don’t have a 300. The Time Machine will back up everything, then make periodic back-ups of the changes since the last. The more back-up space you have, the farther ‘back into time’ you can go to recover old material. Once the drive is full, it will start over-writing the oldest data. You can also exclude things from the TM back-up like web caches and other non-essential space wasters, which will help delay the over-write of past back-ups.