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consolidating time machine folders

B

bobsebnz

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 17, 2014
22
0
Hi
i have backed up my macbook data in a time machine (on an external hard disc) and taken more than 15 backups till now. I used to copy my photos in the camera to the laptop and delete the old folders when i run out of space. I am annoyed to see the backups arranged as per the date. while browsing through time machine folders, i could find that the same group of photos backed up in last, previous day and last weeks back up dates.

Now I wanna move all those photos to a different hard disc dedicated only for photos. I wanna consolidate my photo album folders without any duplicates,
Do i need to go and copy individual sub folder in different backed up dates in the time machine to do that ?

So eventually i wanna consolidate all the backup up dated folders together, don't wanna see back ups arranged in a date format i.e. irrespective of the deleted ones, whatever new back up comes, they all should fall in the same set of folders.
is this possible
 
You shouldn't be looking inside time machines folder structure. If you start messing with that, you'll break it. Let it do its thing. You should treat the disk or volume its in as a black box, you don't need to know whats in there, or care, TM handles it so you don't have to and so its easy to get back a file from any date when you need to.

If you want some other backup arrangement where you can manually decide where everything is and its all neat and tidy and arranged as you'd like it, then copy folders yourself and don't use TM at all.
 
Don't mess with Time Machine. If you move folders, you may corrupt your backup. Which then means you don't have a backup. Let Timemachine do its thing.
 
thanks for the replies, highly appreciated

i am confused, is that mean i will never be able to take a copy of an individual folder (all the previous dated backups) and moved to a separate hard disc dedicated only for photos.
 
Last edited:
bobsebnz said:
thanks for the replies, highly appreciated

i am confused, is that mean i will never be able to take a copy of an individual folder (all the previous dated backups) and moved to a separate hard disc dedicated only for photos.
Click to expand...

Do you mean "copy," or do you mean "move?" You've used both words in that one sentence. Move means you leave nothing behind. Copy means you are leaving the original alone.

Yes, you can copy files from Time Machine. Just do not erase them from Time Machine (and, as the others have said, do NOT re-organize what's on Time Machine).

I get the impression you're worried about wasted storage space. When it comes to Time Machine, there is no waste, just as money in the bank is not wasted - it's saved for when you need it.

Time Machine is there to save you from disaster. If you want protection, let Time Machine do its job, exactly as it was designed to do it. If you don't want protection, turn off Time Machine and do whatever you please with that hard drive. It's that simple.

The name "Time Machine" was very well chosen. If you read or watch science fiction, you should understand that you're not supposed to go back in time and change history. If you do, there's no telling what things will be like when you return to the present.
 
The name "Time Machine" was very well chosen. If you read or watch science fiction, you should understand that you're not supposed to go back in time and change history. If you do, there's no telling what things will be like when you return to the present.

That's a great way to put it!

In my opinion, photos are priceless & hard drives are cheap.
I use Time Machine AND an offsite backup. At least.
I've had a lighting strike that took out a Mini and a backup drive attached to a, now dead, airport extreme.
 
bobsebnz said:
thanks for the replies, highly appreciated

i am confused, is that mean i will never be able to take a copy of an individual folder (all the previous dated backups) and moved to a separate hard disc dedicated only for photos.
Click to expand...

Why would you do that? (and I agree BTW you are confusing copy and move. they are very different)

If you want your photos backed up somewhere specific, and documents backed up somewhere else, etc, then TM wont do that. TM backs everything up to the same disk.

Perhaps you dont understand that TM isn't just backing files up, its backing upversions of files. So you can go back to a photo that you perhaps altered last week, last month last year and choose the version as it was on one of those dates.

If you want your photo backups in one place, pdfs another, etc, get a backup app and configure it to work that way and dont use TM.
 
Tumbleweed666 said:
...
If you want your photo backups in one place, pdfs another, etc, get a backup app and configure it to work that way and dont use TM.
Click to expand...

I agreed with everything else in your post, however this piece of advice (above) I don't agree with.

I clone my system HDD every night - a bootable backup. I also use TM on it. I use TM to recover from user errors (eg. deleting a file I didn't mean to) and I use the bootable clone to recover from hardware errors.

To the OP: It's not a bad idea to buy another external HDD and to clone your photos to it on a regular basis. Ideally, get at least 2 HDDs and store one off-site. If you never ever have all 3 HDDs (computer, current backup, off-site backup) in one place (even when you swap the current and off-site HDDs) then you have protected your priceless images extremely well.
 
thanks guys for the replies,

Is thr any back up software available for mac, to take backups copies of only my photo folders ?

irrespective of the deleted ones, new set of photos should be added to a dedicated folder in an external hdd
 
Well any good backup software will copy whatever folders you tell it to so just put your photos within one main folder (even if there are many sub folders)

Carbon copy cloner (despite the name) will do more than just clone, you can check that out as a start it will run on a schedule, backup specified flders, etc.
 
bobsebnz said:
thanks guys for the replies,

Is thr any back up software available for mac, to take backups copies of only my photo folders ?

irrespective of the deleted ones, new set of photos should be added to a dedicated folder in an external hdd
Click to expand...

I use Carbon Copy Cloner to sync various folders from my MBP to my NAS. Works quite well.

In your original post you seem to looking for an archiving solution, not a backup solution. The two are very different and time machine is not an archive.
 
yes you said it right,

i been after an archiving software which just adding only photos in the new folders to an external drive.
does carbon copy gud for that ?
i am less concerned on backup dates here, more on orderly copy pasting new files to an external drive as per the file names.

as the guys mentioned here, i vl take regular backups with time machine to avoid any accidental loss of my files as well.

any issues having both time machine and carbon copy working together in a mbp?
 
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There's Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! for cloned backups. Look at each and see which one suits your needs.

They can be set to run at a specific time - for instance when you're not typically using the computer. And they can copy the entire HDD or just a selection of folders. If you copy the system folder(s) you can create a bootable backup. If your computer HDD crashes you can then attach the backup external HDD and boot off of that disk so that you can keep working while waiting for a replacement internal drive. There are a few minor restrictions about what kind of disks etc. so do your research first if a bootable backup is important to you. CCC and SuperDuper run just fine in conjunction with TM. I use both SD and TM. I also use 3 external HDDs for my cloned backups. One is in a safety deposit box, one is connected, and one is spare.

If you want to archive your photos, you would make a cloned backup to an external HDD or to a set of DVDs and then store those. Once written, an archive is never written over. One of the risks of backing up is that a photo has become randomly corrupted on the internal HDD, without you noticing it. You are therefore making a perfect copy of a corrupted image. Because an archive is never written over, you can recover the uncorrupted image from the archive - assuming you created the archive before the corruption occurred.

Hope this helps.
 
thank you so much for the replies guys

this forum is really awesome, and thanks guys for the get support, really appreciated
 
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