Moving a Time Machine Backup

[Huntn]

If you have a large Time Machine Backup that you want to migrate to another hard drive, can you just manually move the last 5 save (files) and get everything? Or are TM backups sequential so that you'd not get everything?
Thanks!

[Weaselboy]

That won't work. Give this a read. It explains how TM works and you how what you want to do is going to break the backup.

[RedCroissant]

Originally Posted by Huntn

If you have a large Time Machine Backup that you want to migrate to another hard drive, can you just manually move the last 5 save (files) and get everything? Or are TM backups sequential so that you'd not get everything?
Thanks!

Definitely not. I don't know if you already took care of the problem, but the best way is to open Disk Utility and restore the TM backup to the drive that wish to move it to. It takes a while, but that's the way to do it.

[Huntn]

Originally Posted by RedCroissant

Definitely not. I don't know if you already took care of the problem, but the best way is to open Disk Utility and restore the TM backup to the drive that wish to move it to. It takes a while, but that's the way to do it.

Thanks for the advice. Time to fess up, I'm an idiot when it comes to Time Machine Backups. Complacency...

I have a G5 that died a while ago. With it I had several external firewire drives that included a 1TB ext USB drive where I kept my TM backups of those FW drives. I decided to move it all over to my MBP (see sig).

Thinking I would start from scratch, I thought I'd start from scratch and moved the old backup to the trash. Hold the giggles until I'm finished. Then I discovered one of my fire wire drives hooked to another FW drive with a Firewire 6 pin connector was not mounting on my desktop. The other FW drive was connected to an older USB Hub (USB or USB2) to my MBP.

At this point, I tried to take the backup out of the trash to where it originally was located on the TB backup drive (Actually that drive is partitioned into 2 so I'm only working with 500GB. I left it run overnight and woke up in the morning to a message that there was not enough space on the drive. This is where it came from. I have no idea why.

Plan B- Then I tried to move it out of the trash to another FW drive connected through the USB hub and let it go. It's unbelievable, I let it run while it tallied up the files- 16 million+ and 5 hours and counting before I gave up and decided to go to plan C. I'm wondering if the reason it's so slow is that I'm using a FW drive through an old USB hub?

Plan C is to get hold of a Firewire 6pin-9 pin adapter, since I don't have a cable with the required fittings. All of my Firewire drives have either USB or 6 pin connectors. After I get hold of the 6-9pin adapter, I'm going to see if the drive in question will mount when connected via my MBPs 9 pin FW port. If it mounts, then I'm going to take the TB drive, return it to a single partition and start over with my TM backups.

IF the suspect FW drive will not mount, then Plan D to restore it's data is to try to get the backup out of the trash using a faster connection, Firewire on the MBP or a USB 3.0 hub.

Is there such a thing as a Firewire 9 pin to USB cable? Would that be a good option? Thanks!

[Fabricman112]

time machine backups are incremental... otherwise you wouldnt be able to use it as a "time machine" i.e. restore a system you had a week ago.
when you do a backup TM checks your files, any variation in size or date will be saved to the latest...

I have been forced to boot from a TM-backup a couple of times, and I have to say it does the job really well...

the point is... you need the complete Backups.backupdb folder to restore the computer, and deleting a folder cant be done manually... your best option is to do a new TM to an external hdd

[RedCroissant]

Originally Posted by Huntn

Plan C is to get hold of a Firewire 6pin-9 pin adapter, since I don't have a cable with the required fittings. All of my Firewire drives have either USB or 6 pin connectors. After I get hold of the 6-9pin adapter, I'm going to see if the drive in question will mount when connected via my MBPs 9 pin FW port. If it mounts, then I'm going to take the TB drive, return it to a single partition and start over with my TM backups.

IF the suspect FW drive will not mount, then Plan D to restore it's data is to try to get the backup out of the trash using a faster connection, Firewire on the MBP or a USB 3.0 hub.

Is there such a thing as a Firewire 9 pin to USB cable? Would that be a good option? Thanks!

Are you talking about using a FW 400 external with a FW 800 port on your MBP? If so, that cable definitely exists and would make it much easier than trying to find a FW to USB adapter. In fact, that's the way that I connected all of my externals(well at least the FW 400 one in addition to the usb 2.0 ones before I imply decided to upgrade my internal HDD to 3TB). And if it doesn't mount, then something else is wrong.

[Huntn]

Originally Posted by RedCroissant

Are you talking about using a FW 400 external with a FW 800 port on your MBP? If so, that cable definitely exists and would make it much easier than trying to find a FW to USB adapter. In fact, that's the way that I connected all of my externals(well at least the FW 400 one in addition to the usb 2.0 ones before I imply decided to upgrade my internal HDD to 3TB). And if it doesn't mount, then something else is wrong.

I based 6 and 9 pin description based on how they look, but I think you are right.

[Huntn]

Originally Posted by Weaselboy

That won't work. Give this a read. It explains how TM works and you how what you want to do is going to break the backup.

Thanks!

[Huntn]

It looks like I still have my Time Machine backup (sitting on a 1TB external drive that is partitioned into two 500GB partitions). My goal now is to turn the 1TB drive into a single partition TM backup. However I've found it uses Master Boot Record partition scheme and it won't let me delete the non-TM partition and expand the TM partition to the full size of the disk without loosing the TM backup.

I've done some snooping around it it looks like the answer is to change the partition scheme to GUID, however that looks like I'm going to loose my TM backup in the process. Is there a way to keep the TM partition and expand it without loosing its data? Should I be using GUID with MacOSX?

Can you backup folders instead of entire volumes? I've not found that answer yet.
Thanks!

Right now, I'm trying to move this 158GB backup file to another drive and it's taking forever. :-\

Edit: I think I'm seeing another issue. The backup folder holds two sub folders, one for my MBP which I'm currently using, and one for my G5 which is now dead. I'd like to restore a volume from the G5 backup. How do I tell TM I want to restore from the G5 TM backup?
Thanks!

Edit2: Found the answer to the edit question, click on TM icon in toolbar while holding option key to look "Browse Other Time Machine Disks".