Time Machine Questions For Experienced Users

[Chupa Chupa]

My situation:

Currently my boot drive has a total of 500GB (2x250 RAID 0) and my ext. Time Machine drive is a 750GB external.

The available free space in my boot drive has dwindled down to 80GB so I need to upgrade ASAP and have already put an order in for a TB (2x500 RAID 0).

Given that here are my questions:

1) Even with the TB drive installed the amount of data that needs to be backed up will be significantly less near term. My Time Machine drive has 200GB of free space right now. That should hold me for at least 6 months until I'm ready to upgrade my TM drive. But will TM allow me to use a physically smaller drive than the boot drive it's backing up?


2) When I install the new drive I'll just clone my previous drive. Will Time Machine recognize the data on the new drive is the same or will it think new drive and duplicate the drive again? In other words, how smart is TM? Once I clone my boot drive and get my Mac running again can I plug and play my existing TM drive or do I need to reinitialize it first?

 

[netnothing]

You just may be the first ever to try all this Exciting huh?

I think the biggest issue is going to be #2. I'm not sure how TM will view the new cloned drive. I know that TM can handle having more drive space in the machine than available drive space to backup. I have 1.25 TB in my Mac Pro, but only a 500GB external for TM (I only have about 250GB being used on the internals).

So I think the biggest question will be whether TM sees it as a new volume and will try to re-backup the whole thing.

Maybe someone else who has done this can chime in.

As for backing up and moving your TM disk to a new external. There have been people that have successfully cloned the TM backup to a larger drive, and it picked up right where it left off.

I'm surprised you are doing RAID 0. Seems risky to me with that much data, considering the high failure rate.

-Kevin

 

[Chupa Chupa]

I'm surprised you are doing RAID 0. Seems risky to me with that much data, considering the high failure rate.

Yeah, but then that's why I have a backup. Plus I also keep crucial data on offsite server so I have lots of redundancy. (I also learned staying away from WD drives can prevent disasters too ). Thanks for the info on the drive size.