Can I use the same Time Machine external HDD with my clean installed Mavericks?

[SamIchi]

Sorry for the awkward wording.

I've been using an external for my Time Machine backups, and I recently clean installed Mavericks. I don't want to restore my old data via TM, I'm only going to grab files from my backup as I need them.

Can I use that same external to start new Time Machine backups? Will it delete everything? In my situation what would be the best way to approach this? I have other Hard Drives that are smaller, but I would like to use my big one.

Also, can I delete old Time Machine Backups on the drive, and just keep the newest one? Or are they all linked together or something? For each backup that TM makes, they are about 500GB, and I have about 8 of them in a 2TB drive. How is that possible? Does this mean they are somehow linked together?

 

[BigHungry04]

They are linked by name of computer if it is connected via USB, FireWire or Thunderbolt. If you change the name of the computer, the backup should remain. I think if it is a networked drive it does it by MAC Address, not entirely sure about that. If you use a different name, I believe that you should be able to keep the old backup, and use it to transfer data to your new setup.

 

[Ravenis]

when you plug in the external hdd on the fresh mavericks copy, it should prompt you to set up time machine or inherit the previous back ups from what I recall

 

[I'm a ROb]

Keep in mind that if you continue using it as a TM-drive with the same machine name, it will ask you if it's ok to start deleting older versions when the disk is full.

All the TM-backups are incremental. The first backup takes a long time and afterwards it only back up the changes you made. So yes: they are somehow linked together.

 

[SamIchi]

Keep in mind that if you continue using it as a TM-drive with the same machine name, it will ask you if it's ok to start deleting older versions when the disk is full.

All the TM-backups are incremental. The first backup takes a long time and afterwards it only back up the changes you made. So yes: they are somehow linked together.

I would like to partition my 2TB drive. So is there a way to delete the old backups, and just keep the latest one, without losing data?

 

[I'm a ROb]

You could try:

1. open the TM disk in finder
2. navigate to Backups.backupdb/<<machine name>>/Latest
3. copy the files you want.

You should now have the latest files that were on the TM and copy them to some other location or disk. But I'm not sure it you can use the TM restore option.