Entourage and Time Machine

E

Ed Kimball

Diane,

I've looked over your recommendations for archiving and, unless your
Entourage database is huge, I see no reason to exclude your MS User Identity
from Time Machine. It's true that TM creates a backup hourly, but it keeps
hourly backups only for the most recent 24 hours. It keeps only one backup a
day for a month, and only one backup a week older than a month.

Thus, once you have one full day's worth of backups, TM is effectively
creating only one new copy of your database each day anyway. The only extra
copies are the most recent day's (23 extra copies if you never shutdown).
Unless you backup up to a relatively small hard drive or have a multi-GB
database, the extra copies shouldn't be much of a problem.

For example, I have a 250MB database backing up to a 250GB hard drive.
Twenty-three extra copies is less than 6GB.

Am I missing something?

Ed.
 
D

Diane Ross

I've looked over your recommendations for archiving and, unless your Entourage
database is huge, I see no reason to exclude your MS User Identity from Time
Machine. It's true that TM creates a backup hourly, but it keeps hourly
backups only for the most recent 24 hours. It keeps only one backup a day for
a month, and only one backup a week older than a month.

Thus, once you have one full day's worth of backups, TM is effectively
creating only one new copy of your database each day anyway. The only extra
copies are the most recent day's (23 extra copies if you never shutdown).
Unless you backup up to a relatively small hard drive or have a multi-GB
database, the extra copies shouldn't be much of a problem.

For example, I have a 250MB database backing up to a 250GB hard drive.
Twenty-three extra copies is less than 6GB.

Am I missing something?
Click to expand...

Most people have database that are much larger. You database at 250MB is
extremely small. I would say a typical database is around 2GB. Some users
have over 10GB, but that's at the high end.
 
A

Allen Watson

And, unless you carefully prune your database regularly it will grow fairly
rapidly. Whatever its size, you are going to have 23 copies plus daily
copies, say if you keep data going back 3 weeks another 21 copies...if your
database reaches 2GB you would be spending 88 GB just on Entourage data.
Yikes!
 
E

Ed Kimball

I guess my reaction is "So?". I have had my database close to 1 GB, but
never bigger than that, as far as I can recall. I have rules that throw out
most of my old mail after a month, so "pruning" is pretty automatic. So even
if I have 40GB out of 250 used for Entourage databases, I have plenty left.

Besides, if you're going to back up the Entourage database daily (as I
believe Diane suggested), you're still going to have about half that amount
allocated to Ent. databases.

My point is -- is it worth the hassle to be making a copy of the database
each day for Time Machine to copy in order to save at most 23 copies of the
database? (It's a few copies less in my case, since my computer
automatically shuts down at night and restarts in the morning.) Storage
continues to get cheap. My 250 GB drive cost less than $100; I just bought
500GB for $140.
 
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