Can't Restore from TM - Not Enough Space???

[simonsi]

My wife's early-2011 15" has the stock 500GB HDD. She had an issue with iPhoto that left 4000 recovered photo's so decided to restore a TM backup from a couple of days previously to get them back (the recovered ones were small file sizes and nothing would display them). Library is approx 50,000 images total.

I took a further copy of the iPhoto library, then deleted her library from the HDD, emptied trash and start to restore from TM. Now the library is 341GB, with the HDD trash emptied of the old library she has 440GB free but neither a TM restore nor a straight Finder copy of the pre-delete copy I made will work, both eventually give a "Not enough Free Space" error.

So am I stuck? Didn't expect to remove 341GB and not be able to replace it onto the same disk.

After some ideas:

1. Replace the 500GB with a 1TB - should work and we may have needed to do this soon anyway.

2. Boot into target disk mode and Finder copy via my MBP (i.e. external with the copy mounted on my MBP, copy to the 15" in Target Disk mode.

Any other ideas appreciated, wife is understandably nervous until her library is back up despite we have 3 recent copies (TM, pre-delete copy and DR offsite copy 1mth old).

 

[Macman45]

I think I'd go with option toe...increase the HDD size. If the space is borderline now, then even if you do get the data back on, you are going to be maxed out on that drive anyway.

 

[simonsi]

Hmmm, I think I'm angling that way, just noticed the drive has a negotiated link speed of only 3G too so explains why the 15" is quite sluggish, think perhaps a 1TB Hitachi 7200rpm as in mine is on the cards, don't want to spend SSD $$ on it at the moment.

 

[Macman45]

Hmmm, I think I'm angling that way, just noticed the drive has a negotiated link speed of only 3G too so explains why the 15" is quite sluggish, think perhaps a 1TB Hitachi 7200rpm as in mine is on the cards, don't want to spend SSD $$ on it at the moment.

I have four Hitachi 1TB enterprise HDD's in my Pegasus. Never missed a beat and have a five year warranty. They do cost a little more than standard drives, but for mission critical data they are worth the extra few bucks.

That R4 contains my entire media library ( except music) so it's running RAID0 the unit has never missed a beat.

I'd avoid Seagate...we had 3 fail in a matter if weeks and they were all brand new...Hitachi, WD are both good options.