Time Machine should be limitable

Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard is one of the most configuration-free pieces of software I’ve ever used.

It has three options: the disk to hold backups, folders you don’t want to back up and ON/OFF.

Marvellous, simple and very effective.

But that said, it would be great if (all user requests must start with ‘it would be great if’) you could limit the amount of space Time Machine consumes on the backup disk.

By default, it consumes all space available on the volume eventually. This is a very sensible default, but is not necessarily desirable.

I keep lots of downloaded TV shows on my external HD, and want to add them as I wish without having to wipe my Time Machine backup archive from scratch whenever I have no space left.

Also, there must be some sort of code in place for Time Machine to do this already. It must have a subroutine which, when the disk is full, says ‘Ah, I’ve reached my limit. I need to delete the oldest backup.’ All Apple need do is expose a variable which defines that limit, rather than making it ‘the size of all disk space available’.

Finally, as this is one of those user requests, I need to get this line in:

It can’t be that hard to do, surely?