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Migrate to new Time Machine drive

M

mtehonica

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 7, 2007
199
53
Hey all,

Just wondering if anyone has tried migrating Time Machine from one drive to a new one. I have a 100gig external connected to my Mac Mini and I'm doing backups to that from my Macbook Pro and my girlfriends Macbook over the network. Want to move to a 500gig external and just wondering if I take those sparseimage files and move them to the new drive, if it will work fine. Any ideas??

Thanks!
 
mtehonica said:
Hey all,

Just wondering if anyone has tried migrating Time Machine from one drive to a new one. I have a 100gig external connected to my Mac Mini and I'm doing backups to that from my Macbook Pro and my girlfriends Macbook over the network. Want to move to a 500gig external and just wondering if I take those sparseimage files and move them to the new drive, if it will work fine. Any ideas??

Thanks!
Click to expand...

If the drive is named the same and you just drag everything to the new HD....then it should in the eyes of the computer be the same drive.
 
EricNau said:
I wouldn't do that.

Just change the backup disk through Time Machine preferences.
Click to expand...

I was thinking just name the disk the same and copy the sparseimage files over too. Because if you just change the time machine drive then you will lose all the previous backup and it will do a new full backup.
 
mtehonica said:
I was thinking just name the disk the same and copy the sparseimage files over too. Because if you just change the time machine drive then you will lose all the previous backup and it will do a new full backup.
Click to expand...
What's the problem with that (besides some wasted time)?
 
EricNau said:
What's the problem with that (besides some wasted time)?
Click to expand...

The problem is what I said before, if you just change the time machine drive then do a full backup again, you will lose all the previous incremental backups. So the file I just realized I deleted from a week ago, I can't get back.
 
Migrating TM Files

The Finder (and PathFinder) won't work: the way the "file pointers" (dumb, hard aliases) work causes the F/PF to attempt to copy a >full< hard drive copy for every date you have a backup - you run out of space ASAP.
The only thing that might work is to partition the lager drive so it is the same size as the old TM drive, clone the TM drive to the new partition, and then resize the partition to fill the new drive. (Otherwise, the cloned drive will think it is as small as it used to be, and won't see the extra space.) I have not gotten this to work, but mostly because a Western MyBook drive (which was my first TM drive) has a built-in power-save mode that can't be turned off and causes a clone to time-out fail. Once you try this, the new drive will have the same name as the old one, and TM should work right off - you can turn off TM, change the name, turn on TM, and tell it to change back-ups to the renamed disk.
 
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