MacBook :: Backup With Time Machine Without Reformatting External HD?
Jun 12, 2010
I have a MacBook that I'm trying to backup because my husband wants to sell my computer and buy an iPad. I have a WD external hard drive with an iPhoto library currently on it, chronicling the first 28 months of my first child's life; needless to say it's important! The problem is that Time Machine won't back up to the external drive without erasing everything on it! Is there any way around this?
I will probably also need tips on how to put the iPhoto library (28 months to present time, about 2,200 pictures!) on my MacBook onto the hard drive (does that automatically happen upon backup?). Obviously I've done it once, because there is a library currently on the hard drive, but I can't remember how I did it.
I want to delete the Time Machine backup for my MacBook Pro because I no longer own the machine. In the past I know I've tried to delete a backup by dragging it to the trash and emptying it, but I remember that didn't work. The finder would just say something along the lines of "calculating blah blah blah..." for hours.
I have a external HD which has always worked fine under snow leopard. Since upgrading to lion I keep getting the following message The identity of the backup disk has changed since the previous backup.The disk may have been replaced or erased, or someone may be trying to trick your computer into backing up to the wrong disk. And after this the drive disappears from the desktop appearing agian only after restart. What can I do do rectify this? Delete and re-intialise the drive?
Can I store some pictures on my External HD that I use for Time machine Backups? It is not partitioned and at the moment all I have on that HD is my backups. I know they would already be on the HD if they are on my computer, I just don't know how I go about pulling one folder of pics off the time machine.
I have a MacBook and will be purchasing an external harddrive to backup all my info from OS X. I also have a partition on the drive in the MacBook for windows and would like to use the external as a backup for that as well. Do I have to format the external and partition to backup each OS? I am new to the whole backup of info with an external harddrive.
My 6-year old MBP17 just lost its logic board. It is now officially a paper weight. Can I boot-up an old Mac Mini from the Time Machine backup created from my laptop (until I purchase a new MBP) ?
I just got a new MacBook Pro for graduation. I've decided to use my iMac as an external display and use my Macbook Pro as my main computer. My iMac has about 1TB of space while my MacBook has about 500 GB. Since I'll be using my iMac primarily as a external display I was thinking about also using it as an external harddrive so I can backup my data from my Macbook via Time Machine.Is this ok to do? Does anyone advised that I don't? I just want to make sure I don't screw up anything before doing so. BTW I also have a WD external harddrive connected to my iMac.
Info: MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.4), Main Computer
I have an external 500gb drive plugged into my brand new Time Capsule. The 500gb drive basically stores my entire library of music and my iTunes points to this external drive.
Is it possible to have time machine backup all information on the 500gb drive to the time capsule, so encase the external drive takes a dump, I don't loose my entire music library? Maybe time machine is already doing this, I am not sure.
I have just set up an external hard drive to my wireless router and am now wanting to set up Time Machine to back up to the hard drive. I can see the hard drive in Finder and can even send files to it manually. I just don't see in setting up Time Machine any option to backup to that hard drive.
I have a 320GB internal drive and 1TB (MyBook) external drive. I recently bought a second 1TB external drive (MyVault)to use with Time Machine. I have removed the exclusion of MyBook so that Time Machine backs it up but so far it has refused to do so. It is happily backing up the internal drive. I have looked in the Mac OSX Leopard Missing Manual but still have no clue as to what I am missing. The initial setup (and backup) did not include MyBook until I discovered that I would have to remove it from the exclusions.
So right now I have 2 external hard drives, a 2TB MyBook Mirror edition, set at RAID 0 so its a full 2TB, and a 1TB MyBook Home Edition. I also have three LaCie 1TB drives to back up the MyBook drives.
How I back up is basically copy the contents over to the backups once a month. The problem is, using USB (my only option) takes about 24 hours per TB. Backing up 3 days a month? Not fun.
Can Time Machine do this better? I still have Tiger, so can't test it yet but it seems tedious to do things my way. I would rather be able to plug them in and sync every few weeks and not have to replace every file, just the ones that changed or were added. Can this be done?
I don't keep the drives connected 24/7 so it would have to be manual, and also can Time Machine back up a 2TB drive to 2 1TB drives? The are stuck in enclosures so i have to connect the 2 separately through USB, can't use RAID.
If Time Machine is not the answer, is there some third party program the would not require me to re-copy every file? It would be great if I could save some time doing this.
So I've run into a Mac issue I'm not sure how to handle. I've got a Mac Pro running Leopard. I've got 3 internal Harddrives: 1.) 250 GB (runs my OS and applications), 2.) 500 GB (where I store all my source files for my business), 3.) 750 GB (serves as the backup for Time Machine for all the files on Harddrives 1 and 2.). So I began thinking the other day. What would happen if somehow all 3 harddrives were destroyed (theft, fire, power surge, flood damage, etc.)? I would lose years worth of source files from my business (graphic and web design files mostly).
So I went and bought a 1 TB external drive today. Ideally I would like to put the external drive in another location and bring it out maybe once a week to backup the 3rd harddrive from above (the one being used for Time Machine). Does anyone have any suggestions on how to backup this harddrive...some type of program that essentially acts like Time Machine? I just basically need it to mirror my Time Machine Harddrive. I found a program named Super Duper (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13803/superduper) not sure if anyone has had experience with it or not. I'm open to any suggestions on how to use the external harddrive to back up my Time Machine harddrive.
I have a seagate 320 gb external hard drive(with usb). Currently I am using a hackintosh and I will switch to Mac in a month. In my external HDD I have 200gb of pictures-movies-tv shows-documents. It is formatted with NTFS so I use it with Macfuse and NTFS 3G. When I get a macbook pro 15" i5 with 320gb hdd I will transfer all 200gb to my MBP, format the HDD to Mac os journaled instead of ntfs and use the hard drive for time machine.
After that I will still have some space. I want to use that space for carrying around documents for example to carry my presentation with me to the school. Can I use it like that? Also computers at school uses Windows, can windows read and write Mac OS Journaled format? Additional quick question: In windows if HDD is full pc gets slower, do macs get slower when hard drive is near full?
We just came back from vacation 2 days ago; I checked time machine. It says latest backup is delayed; then latest backup failed; next backup when disk is connected. I have a WD external hard drive. I check to see that it is connected to my IMac and is plugged in for electricity. Restarted my imac - same problem. There is no lite on the WD; does it mean it died? Or what can I try? It is less than 2 yrs old.
I want to plug in my computer into my USB dock, automatically mount my external HD, have TimeMachine do its thing automatically (so far, so good), but then immediately after the backup finishes, I want the computer to automatically unmount the HD. This will allow me to close the laptop and go somewhere without having to constantly eject the HD everytime I unplug the computer.
So - what I need is a program / script / etc that will tell the computer to eject the drive as soon as TimeMachine is done backing up.
I was thinking of getting an external hard drive for use with Time Machine. On Amazon I found a Seagate 1.5 TB unit for $129. However there is a similar model "for the mac" for $192. I am wondering if the cheaper unit would work, or if the one for 50% has some indispensable feature.
i was backing up my macbook nightly up until a few months ago but then stopped.
i want to wipe the external drive im using and start all over with fresh back ups. can anyone explain to me how i can do all this? i completely cant remember how i did it first time around!
Okay I've had it with VMware Fusion 3, tried Parallels. The graphics capabilities are poor for my standard of work (we use 3DS Max and Maya for intensive modelling during studies). I know my graphics card is quite outdated (ATI X1600) but a lot of the graphics-intensive apps on the Mac side run very smooth.
So I'm going down the Boot Camp route since graphics-wise, it'll use the actual X1600 instead of some virtual one. It's telling me that I need to reformat into Mac OS Journaled or something, and some basic research tells me the only way to achieve this is a fresh install.
My question is, if I perform a Time machine backup onto my external drive, will it restore the applications/settings/files completely how they were, after I reinstall OS X?
I am using Time Machine with my external drive. And since my external hard disk does not have too much capacity, from the time machine options I excluded some folders like movies, music etc. So in time machine preferences it seems it needs 42gb for backup. And it was working like this, backing up 42gb and everyday just backing up changes like 100mb. So in hard drive more or less 50gb was used..70gb free. Until last week.
Suddenly it appeared an error like this "This backup is too large for the backup disk. The backup requires 128 GB but only 97 GB are available". I do not have any idea how this can happen since my backup size seems like 42gb still in options. How it can require 128GB suddenly? Also how can I have 97GB available? I had 70GB last week? I tried to include everything in backup options and exclude again but it does not work. Still I see there 42gb needed for backup but when I connect the drive I am still getting the same error!
I need to deploy multi iMac for my company with exact same setup.I am able to do this with the Time Machine without problem.But I would like to know is there a way to backup the "Time Machine" USB HDD I have created, just incase my USB HDD is corrupted or I need to distribut the Time Machines to other office for deployment? Can I create a dmg file with my existing Time Machine USB HDD. so that I can make multi copy of USB HDD with the same dmg by restoring the dmg?
I am trying to organize my external storage for a new iMac with an 500G SSD drive. I have a new thunderbolt G-Raid drive and an aging Airport Time Capsule. I was thinking of storing music and pictures, as well as a Time Machine backup of the SSD, and storing a Time Machine backup of my music and pictures on the Time Capsule. Will I need to partition the G-Raid?
I'm trying to use Time Machine to backup 44G used to an External Hard Drive with 76.5G available. The backup process always fails. I thought I might have to use Disk Utility to "zero" out data on the external hard drive but the message pops up with an estimated 24 hours to "zero" out all data on the external Hard drive. I have an iMac G5 with 10.5.8
I checked other post and MROOGLE but didn't find an answer to this question. I am interested in purchasing a Mac Mini, but due to the small size of the internal HDD I would have to have an External HDD attached for iTunes Media. Will Time Machine allow me to backup my internal HDD and External HDD to an additional External HDD...?
How do you set up, step by step, Time Machine? I want to create a partition on my external HDD (40GB in size, 120GB capacity) and have it back up to that partition. Is it possible? I only use around <30GB so I figure 10GB extra space is more than enough.
I have an external hard drive that I use with my MBP at work. I'd like to buy another external hard drive to keep at home an also use with Time Machine to backup when at home. Will this work with 10.5.6? What I mean is, will Time Machine work if I plug in another hard drive at home, and still work when I plug in my other drive at work?
I'm having trouble backing up with Time Machine. Here's the setup:
1. Three, 1TB external hard drives in a concatenated software RAID. This means that they are treated as one large drive. There is no mirroring, no increased data rate, blah blah blah. It's just three hard drives in the place of one. I am aware that this means my backup is three times as likely to fail with the hardware, but that's OK.
2. These three are connected to a USB hub.
3. This hub is connected to a G5 tower. The G5 tower can back up to the concatenated drives (I'll call them just a RAID from here on), and also all additional external hard drives that I connect to the G5 tower have been backing up to the RAID no problem. This is great.
Here's the problem:
I'm trying to get two more computers to back up to the RAID wirelessly. I read a lot online about how this didn't used to be a supported feature (backing up to an external hard drive over a network with time machine), but that Apple has recently upgraded Time Machine to support this functionality.
The first computer I started with to try to backup over the network was a Macbook Pro, trying to get it to backup to this RAID. It can see the RAID over the network, mount it, copy files to it/read it, but CANNOT time machine backup to it. I select the network RAID as the backup device, hit "back up now," then get this message:
"The external volume cannot be mounted."
This is really bizzare, considering that it is mounted, and that I can copy to it. Just for your information, I have an airport extreme wireless network that has been working beautifully, no Keychain access issues, no 3rd party firewall, nothing. I've run through Applecare on this issue: the MacBook Pro has never done ANY time machine backup on the RAID, not even a partial one, so there's no dangling sparse bundle or backup folder or anything like that. All network permissions check out, etc. I've tried repairing the RAID with disk utility, as well as repairing permissions (although I have not done either of these things to the MacBookPro).
The latest thing I tried was plugging the RAID directly into the Macbook Pro. Here's where I got the first clue (at least I think so)...Plugged DIRECTLY into the MacBook Pro, the RAID will mount, but the MacBook Pro WILL NOT backup to the RAID. It gives me the same message: the selected volume cannot be mounted. Again, this is strange considering that, just like when I am viewing the RAID over the network, plugged directly into the MacBook Pro the RAID will mount, I can read it, copy files to it, etc.
I have considered plugging the RAID into the Airport extreme directly, but first of all this would mean much slower transfer speeds with the G5 tower, which is a big issue considering the files I am backing up every day, and two, since it seems that the RAID won't be recognized by the MacBook Pro even when plugged in directly, I'm thinking that this is a more fundamental issue.
Time machine is having problems backing up to my La Cie drive. It will start and then show the progress, but it stalls at a very low #(256 kb, for example).
Left it to do its stuff overnight and it never budged. Pulled this off of the console (after reading some other posts). Not sure if this is associated w/the problem, though.
8/2/09 10:28:45 AM mds[34] (Error) Import: importer:0x872000 Importer start failed for 89 (kr:268435459 (ipc/send) invalid destination port)
This error was reported pretty much every 4 seconds.
I erased and reformatted (mac os extended, journaled) the La Cie but that did not seem to work.
