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Time Machine question

B

Bizzz

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 9, 2012
1
0
Hi.

I have a Mac Pro with 4Tb of storage and am about to buy a 4Tb external drive to use with Time Machine.

I want to know, if I use this with Time Machine to backup the Mac Pro, will I be able to plug it into my Macbook Pro and boot from it?

The reason being that my Macbook Pro does not have a 4Tb drive or anything even close, and it would be useful to have a drive that mirrors the Mac Pro.

Is this possible?

Or would I have to clone the Mac Pro to the 4Tb drive instead and use it that way?
 
Weaselboy

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,133
15,596
California
Starting with Lion 10.7.2, you can boot from a time machine disk to restore, but you can't boot and run the OS from it like you are asking. To do that you will need to make a cloned drive with CCC or similar tool.
 
prisstratton

prisstratton

macrumors 6502a
Dec 20, 2011
542
126
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
You cannot boot from a Time Machine backup. If you want to have a bootable backup, then yes, you would need to clone your drive(s).....just as stated by Weaselboy.

If you wanted to use Time Machine as your backup method, then, if your drive(s) fail in the Mac Pro you could boot to the Recovery Partition and then restore from your Time Machine backup.

But........You mention that you DO NOT have a 4 TB HDD in the Mac Pro, I am therefore assuming that you are using several disks. This does raise some other issues. If the disks are being used independently (all mounted as separate volumes), then that is better, but if you have them "strung together" in a concatenated RAID set (giving you one volume of 4 TB), then, if you lose one drive in the set you will lose the whole set and also your ability to boot to the Recovery Partition. Even if they are independent you could still lose your boot drive, so some other bootable drive (USB) is necessary.
 
Last edited:
Weaselboy

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,133
15,596
California
prisstratton said:
You cannot boot from a Time Machine backup. If you want to have a bootable backup, then yes, you would need to clone your drive(s).....just as stated by Weaselboy.

If you wanted to use Time Machine as your backup method, then, if your drive(s) fail in the Mac Pro you could boot to the Recovery Partition and then restore from your Time Machine backup.
Click to expand...

Just to clarify. If you made the Time Machine backup with 10.7.2 or better, you CAN boot from the Time Machine backup and restore. But is not not a bootable system in the sense that one can run the computer directly form the Time Machine backup.
 
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