OS X V10.6 Snow Leopard :: Swapping Multiple Hard Drives For Time Machine Backups?
Apr 12, 2012
I would like to always have one external hard drive attached to my iMac for Time Machine backups, and another external hard drive off site - periodically swapping the two. The though is that if there is fire or theft, it won't help to have a hard drive onsite attached to the computer, because both the iMac and the hard drive could be lost. Is Time Machine smart enough to allow me to configure two drives, so that whenever I plug in one of the drives, it can figure out what needs to be backed up?
Been trying to figure this one out, but can't seem to find a clearcut answer. Here's the dilemma: My 2 1/2 year old MP got replaced under AppleCare by my local Apple store with a new Nehalem MP when they couldn't fix it. The 3 user installed drives in my old MP were good, so they moved them from my old MP to my new one. One of those was the boot drive in my old MP, so the Apple store tech made it the boot drive in my new one. I had the drives arranged in order on my old MP (being the anal engineer that I am), however now my old boot drive is in bay 4, the newer MP boot drive is in bay 2, etc., i.e. all mixed up. Being that the old drives were almost 3 years old I decided to clone my old boot drive to the newer one and make it the startup drive, assuming that it being newer it would be more reliable long term. That all went fine.
Now I know that the OS doesn't care in which bay what drive is but does Time Machine? If I swap around the bays to put my boot drive into bay 1 from bay 2 will that confuse Time Machine and make it backup everything again, i.e. wasting backup space??? I.e., does TM go off of physical name and location or does it go off of logical name?? I know it doesn't matter which drive is where, but I just like having things in a certain order to troubleshooting purposes just in case.
The only way I can see my backups in Time Machine is by using the "option" key and selecting "browse other time macnine disks. However, there is only one Time Machine disk, only one backup appears in the list, there is only one backup directory on the Drobo where I put the backup and I can't find a backup directory anywhere else. HOw do I reset Time Machine so that it defaults to the "other" backup?Â
I plan to 'clean up' my Time Machine/Time capsule completely, whereby I want to make it impossible for third parties to recover all or part of these old backups.After I have accompished this I want to start from scratch backing up my Mac.
Yesterday, I got a disk read error when starting up Windows under Parallels Desktop. After some sleuthing, I found the offending file, and was about to restore from my Time Machine backup when I decided to make sure the disk wasn't going south. I booted off a second, backup, system drive that I keep just for this purpose, and ran aDrive Genius disk scan on the main system drive. All good, only 6Â bad blocks on a 1T drive. I ran this overnight, as it takes an hour or two.Â
This morning, after seeing this result, I booted from the internal system drive, located the offending file again, and entered Time Machine to restore the data. What I found was that ALL of my Time Machine backup data had been deleted. The only data there was a backup from late last night, that WAS FOR THE SECONDARY DRIVE I HAD BOOTED FROM. Seemingly, Time Machine had quietly gone and killed all previous data, and started from scratch backing up my spare drive.Â
There was no warning, no notice, nothing. Over a years worth of backups were gone, and my Parallels installation is now shot, since I can't fix the read problem. I'm contacting Parallels to see if there is any other remedy. You can imagine how absolutely mad I am at this.Â
NOTE:Â
1) I did not touch the backup drive during the boot of the second drive, or the scan test. It was not re-formatted or touched in any way (other than by system software)
In order to use Lion’s encrypted (Core Storage) external drive feature, I needed to reformat an external 1TB drive with Apple Partition Map, as that works only with GPT. The only partition was HFS+J formatted and was used as Time Machine Backup, which I wanted to preserve.Â
Act I:
I connected the drive to another iMac running 10.6 which happened to have enough space on the internal HD. I read this article http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5096 , which describes how to copy the BackupDB just by drag and drop. In hindsight, that was a bad idea, I should have created a disk image like suggested elsewhere, but if Apple itself suggests it, it can’t be so bad right?Â
So I just dragged the whole BackupDB to random folder on the iMac (after enabling ownership), and apparently it copied correctly the dir-hardlinks, as the resulting folder had the same size. Â
It seems that the Finder activates a special dir-hardlink aware copying mode when one does this. This is also confirmed by the fact that the Finder will refuse to copy the BackupDB together with other files, you have to drag and drop the BackupDB only.Â
Act II:
I reformatted the external drive as HFS+J with GPT and activated ownership.. But now, when I try to copy the BackupDB back, it continues to count indefinitely the number of files to copy! I speculate that the special dir-hardlink aware mode is not activated, but what can I do? How can I trigger it? Is there some hidden command line tool which handles this?Â
The lesson I’m drawing from this is: use the method described in the article only if you copy the backupDB from your old to your new drive.Â
My TM backups seem to be proceeding normally on my MBP (which is only sometimes connected to its Time Capsule), but spotlight takes about an hour to index my backup volume each time. Looking at my system.log, I notice that the TM backup volume number is increasing by one each time:Â
[code]...
and so on. Is it normal that the volume name increments each time like this? Could this be related to the long indexing time, which just started recently?
In my Mac Pro I've OSX 10.6 on my boot drive in Bay 1. Bay 2-4 do also contain hd's with loads of data. When putting a new drive in bay 1 and restoring from Time Machine - is it possible to only restore data from hd at bay 1? If yes, how?Â
Currently, I have time machine backing up my iMac on to an external drive.
I also have a third drive filled with movies and music. I would like to set iTunes to play directly off of that drive but I don't want to risk losing that stuff.
Can I set time machine to back up my iMac on HD2 AND ALSO back up HD3 to HD4?
Currently I keep my time machine backup on an external usb hard drive which is a seagate hd in an enclosure I bought a while ago. I want to maintain a second copy of the time machine back up.
Is it better to buy an external RAID enclosure, put the current drive in there, get another drive, and then just have time machine backup to that drive?
Or should I just get another enclosure and another drive? If I do it this way, can I automate the time machine backups across two drives in any way, or I have to manually run it twice?
Is it possible to backup multiple computers to a single external drive connected to an Xserve using Time machine? We have a Six TB external drive that we are connecting to an Xserve that has three drives. We want to backup the entire
Here is what I want to achieve: I have my MBP with a 500GB hard drive that I want backed up to an external 750GB drive (A). Then I have an external 1TB drive (B) that I also wanted backed up to an external 1TB drive (C). Or: Internal -> drive A Drive B -> drive C
Can Time Machine do this all for me or am I going to need a 3rd-party app to help. I know I can easily use TM for doing one of the backups, but will it handle both? If not, what's a good 3rd-party app that will help me accomplish this?
I have an old MBP that I am replacing with a new Retina Display MBP. Last night I did a full backup of my entire MBP (there are actually 2 hard drives in it, I took out the optical drive and used an OWC kit). Today, I restore that backup to my new MBP. I set it to restore everything. However, it only restore the one drive as my new MBP does not have 2 hard drives. I know the 2nd drive is in the Time Machine backup. So how do I manually go in and retrieve those items?
I have a 15" MBP with 256ssd installed and a 13" MBP with a 250gb 5400 drive. I prefer to use the 13" as my main computer and want to take the 256ssd drive from the 15" and put it in the 13". Then take the 250gb drive from the 13" and put it in the 15" How hard is this to do? I've not done something like this before. Since I'm swapping an ssd with a regular hd is it as easy as following the instructions on this forum, remove the screws and swap the drives? After that's done I'll need to overwrite the 15" software and load the OS and drivers for the 13" on to the ssd drive. Is that as simple as taking the restore disk for the 13" put it in the drive and reinstall the OS? Or, should I just take it to the local authorized Apple Dealer and have them do it? (We don't have an Apple store nearby.
I have a Imac 20 with a small 3.5 hard drive and I have bought a bigger 360 gig 3.5 hard drive to replace the old one. I have the new one in an external case with USB 2.0 right now. Is there some way I can transfer the entire contents of the old hard drive on to the new one and then swap out the old drive with the new drive and not miss a beat?
I was just wondering if the big ol' hard drive that I use for Time Machine backups, if I can store other files on there also or can it only hold Time Machine backups?
i have two exact same 17 inch MBPs i am thinking on selling one , one has a lot of stickers and marks on it and the data on that is not at all important (i can format the hard drive no problem). the other one body has very clean and data on that is important lots and lots of photos and videos. i want to sell the one which has clean body so i can get better $ for it. it is possible to just swap hard drives between these two identical MBPs and sell ? would that make any different in performance and also the serial number on ABOUT THIS MAC is that written on hard drive or some place else?
I have 2 MacBooks (with 3 user accounts total) that I would like to back up using Time Machine to a 1 TB hard drive. I'd like to dedicate 700 GB or so of the hard drive to the backups and have the other 300 GB to use for other things. Do I need to create one partition for each computer, or one partition for each user account, or Can I back up all the computers to one 700 GB "Time Machine" partition?
Time Machine is not working correctly since installing Lion. I found (from using Adobe Bridge) that there seem to be automatic back ups being made 20 times a day and onto my hard drive! Usually I back up to an external drive specifically for back up using Time Machine. Now time machine takes several hours to back up when I have that disk wired in (with USB) and the Time Machine icon in the Apple menu is always showing that the back up is delayed. Â
This is the third drive that has failed since I was assigned this Mac Pro at work a few weeks ago, and the drive was purchased less than a week ago. The other two were older drives. They would suddenly stop being readable. Sometimes there was a problem ejecting the drive before it stopped becomeing readable (message would say the drive couldn't be ejected because another program is using it, when there were no programs open). One of them eventually mounted again and I recovered some of the files (but some files weren't readable when I tried to copy them). But that was just luck as they all seem now to be consistently unreadable. When I plug them in I get the message: "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer". same if I plug it into a different computer. And when I try to repair, it shows this: http://i.imgur.com/ivK9d.png. When it happed to the second drive, I just thought it was a fluke... but now a third, brand new drive? Something about the computer must be causing it.
I changed my HD in my MacBook Pro to a bigger one and then wanted to Restore the System via Time Machine onto that new HD. Sadly I dont have the Snow Leopard DVD that was coming with the MacBook. Though I have another Snow Leopard DVD, that I purchased earlier for my older Mac. Now the Problem:When I try to Boot the Macbook Pro from the older Snow Leopard DVD it always freezes and says: "You have to restart your Macbook. Press the power button until it switches off and then press the button again". But iwill not boot from the DVD.Is there another possibility to Restore my System from my Time Machine Backup to the new HD?
I have a older mac mini and a 6 month old macbook pro, the mini's hard drive is full, can I take the one from the mbp, wipe it, and put it in the mini and get a larger one for the mbp? If so are there any recommendations for a HD larger then 500GB for my mbp?
