Backing up large files or directories.

[Weaselboy]

You could pick apart everything I say all that you want. It's not going to change the fact that Time Machine won't let me pick only a few individual files when restoring to a new system.

I think where you are getting hung up is the word "restore."

You are correct that if you boot to a TM backup disk and click the restore button, that is all or nothing. It restores everything to the new drive.

But what chown33 is saying is you could for example buy a new Mac and turn it on and setup your account, then attach the TM disk and look through the backups and pick for example just your iPhoto library to move over (restore) to the new account.

 

[Multipass]

But what chown33 is saying is you could for example buy a new Mac and turn it on and setup your account, then attach the TM disk and look through the backups and pick for example just your iPhoto library to move over (restore) to the new account.

That's exactly what I was told that I couldn't do. I linked to one of the threads explaining it.

I'm having such a hard time coming up with a backup plan.

I just setup Crashplan. After the initial backup (50Gb including a 30GB iPhoto library) I moved the iPhoto library from one directory to another (both directories are backed up by Crashplan). Now it is considering that an entire new file. So it's now 80GB and not only is it wasting 30Gb on my local drive but I have to wait for it to upload that 30Gb iPhoto library again.

The thing is, I just read about how good Crashplan is because it doesn't copy the same file over and over like that Hell, it might have been you who said it!

 

[Weaselboy]

That's exactly what I was told that I couldn't do. I linked to one of the threads explaining it.

I believe what they were discussing in that thread is using Migration Assistant (MA).

MA does give you some ability to pick and choose within broad categories, but not file by file like you want.

Here is what you get with Migration Assistant. You can see there you can uncheck Pictures for example, and bring in nothing from that folder. But there is no way in MA to bring in some data from the Pictures folder and not all the rest.

Same for Documents in that screenshot. All or nothing.

But you could setup a new machine and not run Migration Assistant during setup then manually bring in individual files/folders like showing mentioned.

I don't know what to tell you about Crashplan. I never recommend it any longer because of this mess it caused (see post 17+18 in that thread).