[Macworld]

Post your comments for Time Machine tips and troubleshooting here

[ck4jc]

A great follow-up to this article would be explaining how one can move a Time Machine back up to a new drive. Example, I started my Time Machine backup on a 160 GB external drive. Now I've purchased a new 250 GB drive and I'd like to start using it for my TM backup. However, I'd like to keep my history of backups intact.

Can Carbon Copy Cloner or some such utility do this? (I've heard that Bombich doesn't recommend it, but some have said it works). Can one navigate within the TM backup window to your TM hard drive, choose the "backups" folder, and then in the Action drop-down box (gear) choose "Restore this backup to..." and choose the new drive?

Is there any way to move a TM backup to save the backups and history? Thanks!

[Alarik]

Joe,
Thank you (I see more of you in TidBits).
Please, I've not read your article carefully--skimmed, shame on me, esp. if you've covered this.
But I'm using a LaCie NAS drive, which is Linux-based with a file system called XFS. Am running 10.5.2. I used a small hack that allows one to use a network-based machine with TM (when 10.5 first came out). TM backs up to a sparse image on the NAS drive without a problem, and it recovers files too (quite nifty).
Had you said that the network drive has to be HFS + formatted? The LaCie isn't, and it doesn't show up in Disk Utility, though DU will verify the sparse images.
Is this okay? Am I in danger of having TM's NAS-based sparse image becoming corrupt?
Thanks!
Alarik

[JoeKissell]

ck4jc said:

A great follow-up to this article would be explaining how one can move a Time Machine back up to a new drive. Example, I started my Time Machine backup on a 160 GB external drive. Now I've purchased a new 250 GB drive and I'd like to start using it for my TM backup. However, I'd like to keep my history of backups intact.

Can Carbon Copy Cloner or some such utility do this? (I've heard that Bombich doesn't recommend it, but some have said it works). Can one navigate within the TM backup window to your TM hard drive, choose the "backups" folder, and then in the Action drop-down box (gear) choose "Restore this backup to..." and choose the new drive?

From what I understand, if you use Disk Utility's Restore feature, having first erased the target drive, you can get this to work. I can't speak from personal experience, however.

(update) I omitted to mention that the new version of SuperDuper, 2.5, can also successfully copy a Time Machine volume.
Message was edited by: JoeKissell

[JoeKissell]

Alarik said:

But I'm using a LaCie NAS drive, which is Linux-based with a file system called XFS. Am running 10.5.2. I used a small hack that allows one to use a network-based machine with TM (when 10.5 first came out). TM backs up to a sparse image on the NAS drive without a problem, and it recovers files too (quite nifty).

Had you said that the network drive has to be HFS + formatted? The LaCie isn't, and it doesn't show up in Disk Utility, though DU will verify the sparse images.

Is this okay? Am I in danger of having TM's NAS-based sparse image becoming corrupt?

I am extremely suspicious of that hack. Apple disabled support for NAS drives for a reason, and what I've heard is that you do indeed risk data corruption if you use that approach. I'm not saying you're guaranteed to have problems, but I am saying that you'll get no help or pity from Apple if you do (and it may not be something you'd even notice until it's too late). As for HFS+, that is what Apple says you have to use. Now, the interesting thing about disk images is that they can have a different format from the volume they're sitting on, and perhaps in the case of network backups that's all Time Machine cares about. But still: in my professional opinion, coloring outside the lines is unwise when it comes to backups.

[Alarik]

Joe, thank you for the answer! I'll take your advice to heart. I'll just have to get a Firewire drive for my own machine.

For what it's worth, I've been using the latest version of SuperDuper (for Leopard) and it, too, clones the MacBook to a sparse image on the same LaCie NAS drive. Of course, you can't boot from it. But there sit the two sparse images, side by side.


Presumably one would use DU to do a "restore" from the SuperDuper sparse image, once having booted in the Install disk; however, I've no easy way to test this! At least no way that I wish to experiment with. . . .

Thanks again!

Alarik

[schalliol]

I had a 750GB drive in a 1.8GHz Dual G4 and just got a new Mac Pro. I had time machine for a couple users on that drive. Now that I'm going to move that drive over, can anyone help me figure out how to retain that data? It would really be a shame to lose those older backups.

[PierreB]

Excellent article.
The problem with backing up Aperture has now been rectified (via the 10.5.2 update) so this is no longer an issue. After reading about this, I changed my settings and Aperture (version 1,5) data is getting backed up. If you want to validate go to Apple's discussion forum on Aperture.

[trip1ex]

ck4jc said:

A great follow-up to this article would be explaining how one can move a Time Machine back up to a new drive. Example, I started my Time Machine backup on a 160 GB external drive. Now I've purchased a new 250 GB drive and I'd like to start using it for my TM backup. However, I'd like to keep my history of backups intact.

Can Carbon Copy Cloner or some such utility do this? (I've heard that Bombich doesn't recommend it, but some have said it works). Can one navigate within the TM backup window to your TM hard drive, choose the "backups" folder, and then in the Action drop-down box (gear) choose "Restore this backup to..." and choose the new drive?

Is there any way to move a TM backup to save the backups and history? Thanks!

Can't you just copy your TM backup folder on the your 160gb drive to your 250gb drive. I thought everything was just thrown into a folder. Seems that way to me.

You could also just start from scratch and keep your 160gb drive laying around for a month or two to cover your need for a backup history.

[emork]

I had trouble with using Spotlight in Time Machine. I had a La Cie 500 GB hard disk, and spoke to Apple Tech support for 2 hours. We narrowed it down to my hard drive, and after I reformated it and backed up again, everything worked.

So just a tip to all to reformat hard drives before using them for TM backups, don't trust the formatting straight out of the box.

[JoeKissell]

trip1ex said:

Can't you just copy your TM backup folder on the your 160gb drive to your 250gb drive. I thought everything was just thrown into a folder. Seems that way to me.

No, unfortunately it doesn't work that way, because if you do that, Time Machine will think every file on your computer is different from the ones in the backups (and will therefore try to copy everything again).

[ggore]

I bought a 500g drive at the Apple Store to use with Time Machine on my Intel iMac and formatted it using Disk Utility.
It works fine except when shutting down the computer. Most of the time the drive refuses to unmount, so I have to manually turn off the drive, which causes OS X to complain, but OS X refused to unmount the drive in the first place!
When shutting down the computer the drive has to first be manually turned off or the shutdown procedure will hang. After I do that the computer will continue to shut down.
I'm having other issues with USB thumbdrives refusing to eject, so I suspect this whole thing might be an OS X problem. I was hoping it would be fixed with 10.5.2 but I guess not. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks. I haven't seen this addressed in Apple Support.

[deemery]

Moving Time Machine data is -tough-. Neither Synk nor SuperDuper worked for me. What did work was to use Disk Utility to create a .dmg of the old TimeMachine disk. Then I could do a Restore with Erase Disk option set. This does a block-level copy.

(What I was doing, by the way, was reformatting my external hard drive to a GUID format, so I could also make it bootable, in case I needed to run Disk Utility repair on the iMac's internal drive.)

Carbon Copy Cloner may also work, but again you'll probably need to do a block copy, which means erasing the disk. I have not tried either technique to move data from one -size- disk to another, and I'm afraid it might not work if you try to move data from a larger drive to a smaller one (independent of the amount of data actually on that drive.)

Apple needs to provide us with a 'move TimeMachine backup set' tool.

dave

[spinoza2]

Perhaps related to ggore's problem with unmounting a Time Machine disk, I also have the problem with Time Machine getting 'stuck' sometimes, with it not properly completing a backup and going into a kind of endless cycle. Symptoms are my being unable to copy any files through Finder to the external USB Maxtor drive (formatted properly for Time Machine), and with Finder frequently freezing altogether until I'm forced to pull out the USB cable to the drive. Finder then recovers, but gives the warning that an external device was improperly disconnected. Leopard doesn't have many of them, but I've always just attributed this to a bug.