One of my work drives looked like it was on its last legs, so I got a new drive and copied everything over.. I'm wondering if there's a way to have time machine retain the old backups for all that info? When I put the old drive on exclude, and the new drive starts to get backed up, will I lose all the old backups for that drive?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
New drive for work files. Time machine question.
- Thread starter Soundhound
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Assuming the old drive still works, you could just copy the Backups.backupdb folder from the old drive to the new following this guide.
If you turn off Time Machine then select the new disk as the backup destination, then turn TM back on... nothing on the old drive will be deleted.
If you turn off Time Machine then select the new disk as the backup destination, then turn TM back on... nothing on the old drive will be deleted.
It's not the time machine drive that's being replaced, it's one of the drives included in the backup.
Ah gotcha... TM will not immediately delete that old data from the old drive, but eventually it will as TM does its normal purge of old versions. How long that takes will depend on how much data is involved and how large the TM disk is.
Hmmm. What I assumed I would do was exclude the old work drive from the backup list when I include the new one. And in doing that I figured the old backups would be gone. But you're saying they will remain until room runs out? That would be good,at least I'd retain those older backups, though it might get a bit confusing. I've given the new work files drive a different name.
How do most people handle it when replacing a drive that's included in a time machine backup I wonder?
How do most people handle it when replacing a drive that's included in a time machine backup I wonder?
Do you really need to old data in the TM backups set? If it was me I would just erase the TM backup and start over fresh.
Recently I've actually had several instances where I was glad to have the backups. Usually it's for something I'm working on currently, going back more more than a few weeks. Of course you want to have everything backed up regardless, but as far as iterations go, a few weeks seems to be doing the trick.
I order for those older backups to remain in time machine, do I have to keep that older drive mounted and keep the files on it? I was going to erase the drive and put it away/toss it.
Short term, the files will be in the TM backup, but long term if the drive is no longer there the files will gets purged as older versions and they will be gone.
You really don't want to rely on this as a way to access those old files IMO.
Thanks, it sounds like it'll do the trick for me though. I don't think I need to have the old backups forever, I just want to have a few months' worth at all times. And it sounds like when I switch over to the new drive, the old ones will be around for a while. And by the time they're gone, the new one will have a good backlog?
As long as you keep track that the backup disk does not get close to full, as that would purge off older files and they would be gone.
Here is the purge criteria TM uses.
