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Swapping around Mac Pro Drives & Time Machine

F

fandsw

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 24, 2007
174
33
Helena, AL
Been trying to figure this one out, but can't seem to find a clearcut answer. Here's the dilemma:

My 2 1/2 year old MP got replaced under AppleCare by my local Apple store with a new Nehalem MP when they couldn't fix it. The 3 user installed drives in my old MP were good, so they moved them from my old MP to my new one. One of those was the boot drive in my old MP, so the Apple store tech made it the boot drive in my new one. I had the drives arranged in order on my old MP (being the anal engineer that I am), however now my old boot drive is in bay 4, the newer MP boot drive is in bay 2, etc., i.e. all mixed up. Being that the old drives were almost 3 years old I decided to clone my old boot drive to the newer one and make it the startup drive, assuming that it being newer it would be more reliable long term. That all went fine.

Now I know that the OS doesn't care in which bay what drive is but does Time Machine? If I swap around the bays to put my boot drive into bay 1 from bay 2 will that confuse Time Machine and make it backup everything again, i.e. wasting backup space??? I.e., does TM go off of physical name and location or does it go off of logical name??

I know it doesn't matter which drive is where, but I just like having things in a certain order to troubleshooting purposes just in case.

Thanks!....and sorry for being long-winded......

Frank
 
I don't think so but I'll say this, new machine and those time machine backups will no longer register. I had the same thing and it was the exact same machine that refused to backup without "resetting" it up.
 
jessica. said:
I don't think so but I'll say this, new machine and those time machine backups will no longer register. I had the same thing and it was the exact same machine that refused to backup without "resetting" it up.
Click to expand...

Hmm, maybe this is why my available space on my TM drive has dropped from 340GB to just about 100GB. It might have assumed it was all new and backup everything again. Makes me wonder if it wouldn't be best to reformat the TM drive and start over, just would hate to lose 2+ years worth of backups.
 
Time Machine recognizes different machines based on each machine's MAC address. Changing your machine would then have changed that value, and thus, TM would want to start all over again with at fresh full system backup.

If you are interested, you can change your MAC address back to your old machine's address ( see link below for info ), but this may be a dead end for you as your original machine is gone.
I'm afraid I only know of one way to retrieve your old MAC address... but that hinges on you having done it before your old machine died.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080128003716101

I support a lab of 20+ MPs, and in order to insure that we had a detailed account of how each machine was configured I "printed" each machine's System Profiler info as a PDF file. Buried within is the MAC address for each Ethernet controller on the Mac.

Good luck.
 
Thanks for everyone's help. I've decided to backup the important files to another drive, turnoff Time Machine, physically reorder the drives, erase the TM backup drive, and build a new Time Machine. I can't think of going into the TM more than twice since I've had it the last 2+ years, so it should be no biggie.... Famous Last Words!!! LOL

Thanks again!
 
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