I noticed that it is possible to limit the Quota for the WD_Backup using in the web interface. I did this, however it didn’t affect how much space Time Machine reported as being acessible (it still said I had the whole drive available). Is it possible to use the quota for the WD_Backup user to have it tell Time Machine that only that much space is available? This feature is very important to me because my backups are starting to eat up how much space I can use for my regular files.
The other thing I noticed is that in the time between when I updated to Lion, my backup now needs to do an additional 70GB (my total backup is only ~180GB). At this point, since I haven’t lost anything and it doesn’t seem like I’m able to properly set a quota limit (or limit the size of the time machine partition), I’d like to start over with a fresh time machine backup (I know I lose the abliity to back before today, but the backup will only take up ~180GB instead of the bloated 300+ that it is now). Is there an easy way to clear the Time Machine backup altogether and start over?
You can reset back to factory default, this will delete all data on the drive. Make sure to backup important files before trying this. Just log in to the admin settings > Advance Mode > Configuration.
About the amount of data that TM backs up, you can select which files are going to be backup on the settings. Reducing the quota on the WD Backup share will assure that I does not go pass that quota but it will not affect the amount of files that TM finds for backup.
I noticed that it is possible to limit the Quota for the WD_Backup using in the web interface. I did this, however it didn’t affect how much space Time Machine reported as being acessible (it still said I had the whole drive available). Is it possible to use the quota for the WD_Backup user to have it tell Time Machine that only that much space is available? This feature is very important to me because my backups are starting to eat up how much space I can use for my regular files. Thanks,
This is really the answer I was looking for, beware you need to be an advanced user.
*note* it would be really cool if Western Digital added this as a “ReFormat TimeMachine Backup” option in advanced mode of the user interface.
**Edit**
As a follow up to the post above, if you want to create a new Time Machine backup, you’ll have to recreate the .timemachine folder and assign the owner to WD_Backup and change it’s permissions. The full list of steps is below:
Turn on SSH access in the Avanced Web Interface : System->Advanced
Log into your drive using ssh - via terminal on a Mac it is like this: ssh -l root <nas.ip.address.here>
Once logged in, remove the time machine folder and all subfolders (this takes a few min): rm -rf /DataVolume/.timemachine
Now recreate the folder: mkdir /DataVolume/.timemachine
Give it permissions: chmod 755 /DataVolume/.timemachine
Assign it to WD_Backup: chown WD_Backup /DataVolume/.timemachine
Now you can use the Time Machine Preferences to set up a new backup. Hope that helps!
