Filed under: Leopard
How Time Machine can decrease inhibitions, encourage risky behavior
Let me tell you something about people from Brooklyn: we are, by nature and environment, edgy risk-takers who live life like we're driving a Maserati down the PCH. Or a Camry up the BQE. Anyway, you don't want to mess with us -- and specifically, you don't want to mess with Mike Solomon, a creative director who's apparently got cojones the size of Jonathan Ive's awards cabinet.What did Mike do that earns him the title of Mac Jock Extraordinare? Faced with a weekend on-site video editing project that would require 20 GB of space and only having 10 GB free on his laptop, he didn't bow to the conventional wisdom -- send a production assistant to Staples for a new 500GB drive, or weed out his Downloads folder. No, he decided the best way to free up the needed space was to out-and-out delete his 65 GB iTunes library, the media addict's equivalent of flushing your stash when the cops show up. Then, when he returned home later, he simply restored his library from Time Machine -- no muss, no fuss.
Mike, we salute you and your outside-the-box approach to capacity management. Next time, though, might we suggest a portable drive?
[via Macenstein]
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Jon said 11:14AM on 3-13-2008
Did he secure delete the trash? Just deleteting won't help if the authorities show up :D
Reply
iGO said 12:09PM on 3-13-2008
This brings me to a point of how Time machine might work. Getting a new drive to set this up so I don;t know. I rip and burn ton's of CD's and DVD's. I know I can omit a folder from Time machine backup so I will omit the folder where I store my ripped content, but ripping& burning takes many hours. Does time machine continually back-up what is on my desktop/or-being ripped?....How might I manage this so Time machine is not constantly filling up with partial work in progress?
Tom said 2:31PM on 3-13-2008
You can exclude directories from time machine, as well as just turn time machine off for a period.
YodaMac said 11:18AM on 3-13-2008
PCH? BQE?
Reply
blinkcowz182 said 11:20AM on 3-13-2008
PCH = Pacific Coast Highway, BQE=Brooklyn Queens Expressway :)
WiLLGT09 said 11:23AM on 3-13-2008
Pacific Coastal Highway and Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I had to search for these. Not all of us are down with every acronym, tuaw.
WiLLGT09 said 11:24AM on 3-13-2008
@blinkcowz182 - crap, ya beat me to it
Ryan Trevisol said 12:54PM on 3-13-2008
I knew BQE, and now that I know PCH, I don't think the analogy makes sense. Maybe the other way around. Driving a Camry (poor handling) on the PCH with it's treacherous turns, or a Maserati on the BQE (where lanes are a "suggestion") seems like a more risky proposition.
pacheco said 11:31AM on 3-13-2008
Talk about a rush! I think I'd have a heart attack (they run in my family).
Reply
Kev Orng said 4:12PM on 3-13-2008
"WiLLGT09 said...Not all of us are down with every acronym, tuaw."
Tuaw?
Simon Arch said 9:21PM on 3-13-2008
TUAW - Those Unbearably Apple-centric Writers
I think.
Chill Willy said 11:44AM on 3-13-2008
I've actually done this a few times when games need to be installed on my main drive as opposed to my externals. An extra 35 GBs looks pretty good on an 80 GB laptop hard drive I have to say. I've even forgotten to restore the music library for a couple of days a few times, with no ill-effects. A highly resilient system as it turns out.
Reply
Big John said 12:17PM on 3-13-2008
I've certainly found it's easier to delete files now when I'm not entirely sure I'm through with them thanks to Time Machine. It could be some journal article I read half through and want to make time *eventually* to read it but at the same time don't want to deal with a cluttered Downloads folder. So I can it and if I remember in the future, TM has it for me!
Reply
mungler said 1:02PM on 3-13-2008
the point of redundant backup is that at no point you're relying on only one drive. when he deleted the copy on his laptop leaving the time machine backup his only copy, he risked his data.
not saying i wouldnt do the same thing, but it *is* risky.
now, if his time machine archive was on a mirrored RAID setup like mine.... ;)
Reply
Tom said 2:33PM on 3-13-2008
My concerns come from the problems with how time machine chooses which backup will become the "long term" backup:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/01/28/exploring-the-sands-of-time-machine
qwert said 1:03PM on 3-13-2008
Dammit, my balls are so big, i cant even fit through the door anymore!
i have deleted my itunes library quite often to get some room, even before the sissy way of backing stuff up via timemachine.
im normally not the one to shout "how is this news !!!!1!!!eleven!!", but common, posting a story about a random guy who deleted his itunes libary to make room on his hd?
if you got a slow news day again, mail me, i can send you a few storys about my itunes deletings.
and about my balls too.
qwer
Reply
Gideon said 2:01PM on 3-13-2008
Uhmm, qwert... You need to overcompensate something? ;)
PSM said 3:48PM on 3-13-2008
It may not be the biggest news ever, but it's not about a guy who deleted some files. It's about how the introduction of Time Machine may be changing people's behavior in regards to backups.
Sam said 8:09PM on 3-13-2008
My wife was not happy when I deleted all of our wedding pictures from my laptop to free up space.
I had to VPN into the office, Remote Desktop into the Xserve and open up the Time Machine sparse image to get them back.
Reply
Trimalchio said 2:50AM on 3-14-2008
The portable drive would only have been an option if he had firewire 800, so he'd have to have a 17" macbook pro. Any other external drive interface would be way too slow for doing editing.
Reply