Time Machine to Migrate Drive Data ?

[zephyrnoid]

OK. Leopard newbie here. The situation:
MacPro - with 4 HD bays
My boot drive is the stock drive in bay #1
I wish to start using the much faster drive in bay #2 as the boot/Applications Drive.
In order to do that, must I...
A- use Time Machine to migrate the entire contents of Drive #1 and move it to Drive #2??
B- I can't simply duplicate the contents and paste them into Drive #2.
C- Must I start from scratch and reinstall the OS and simply target the drive in Bay #2??
I want to do this properly and without reinstalling everything from scratch.

 

[sickmacdoc]

I would suggest option D- make it simple on yourself and just clone your drive #1 to drive #2 using the free utility Carbon Copy Cloner. Then see the note at the bottom first.

Run CCC and set it up with your drive #1 as the "Source" and drive #2 as the "Target" and let it run. In the end the contents of drive #2 will be identical to the contents of drive #1 and it will be ready to boot from with no additional process necessary. Just go into your System Preferences when it is complete and use the Startup Disk pane to select your drive #2- then reboot. Your system will then boot from your #2 drive as the default from that point forward.

NOTE- If by chance your drive #2 is a brand new drive, make sure you use Disk Utility and format it as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and make sure the partition map is selected to be "GUID" before trying to clone to it. Most new drives come pre-formatted as one of a couple of PC formats and have a PC partition map type of "MBR", so they need to be prepared for Mac use to be a boot drive.

 

[zephyrnoid]

Wow! quick save! Thanks!
The target Boot drive is a Velociraptor 300GB 10K I bought from OWC. I do remember formatting it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), but will have double check about partition map "GUID".
Thanks again for the lead on CCC. 🙂
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I would suggest option D- make it simple on yourself and just clone your drive #1 to drive #2 using the free utility Carbon Copy Cloner. Then see the note at the bottom first.

Run CCC and set it up with your drive #1 as the "Source" and drive #2 as the "Target" and let it run. In the end the contents of drive #2 will be identical to the contents of drive #1 and it will be ready to boot from with no additional process necessary. Just go into your System Preferences when it is complete and use the Startup Disk pane to select your drive #2- then reboot. Your system will then boot from your #2 drive as the default from that point forward.

NOTE- If by chance your drive #2 is a brand new drive, make sure you use Disk Utility and format it as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and make sure the partition map is selected to be "GUID" before trying to clone to it. Most new drives come pre-formatted as one of a couple of PC formats and have a PC partition map type of "MBR", so they need to be prepared for Mac use to be a boot drive.

 

[Reflow]

Why not use Disk Utility? It does the same job.

Here's how to use Disk Utility to clone and backup your hard drive:

1. When Disk Utility opens, you'll want to select your source. This is the hard drive you want to clone and/or backup. After you have a source, select the Destination. This is the hard drive you want to save the backup image to.

2. Click Restore and you'll end up with a perfect copy of your hard drive. Restart your computer and you're good to go!

 

[zephyrnoid]

That was easy! Thanks to both of you. Is carbon copy different from disc utility in this respect?

Why not use Disk Utility? It does the same job.

Here's how to use Disk Utility to clone and backup your hard drive:

1. When Disk Utility opens, you'll want to select your source. This is the hard drive you want to clone and/or backup. After you have a source, select the Destination. This is the hard drive you want to save the backup image to.

2. Click Restore and you'll end up with a perfect copy of your hard drive. Restart your computer and you're good to go!

 

[sickmacdoc]

That was easy! Thanks to both of you. Is carbon copy different from disc utility in this respect?

Yes, very different in one key aspect. With CCC you wind up with a bootable clone of your drive so you can restart and boot from it to make sure all is well before you go any further. When booted from your clone you should not be able to tell any difference whatsoever compared to being booted from your normal startup drive.

A disk image created with Disk Utility is just a "storage container". It cannot be booted from and has to be opened to even see the files. In a sense it is like a Time Machine backup, as you can restore a drive from it, but cannot first boot from it to make sure the copying of files was done successfully.

 

[zephyrnoid]

se

You may have misunderstood me. I merely wanted to shift my boot disc data to a different drive and indeed, Disc Utility allowed me to do that. In fact in "Startup Disk" preferences,the new drive has been selected as the start up disc even though the original still shows up. My desire is to now use the first drive as the target for a TimeMachine backup of the new boot drive. Now, in another forum there's the recommendation to use SuperDuper along with time machine to create a bootable archive of a boot drive. Obviously, doing this on an external drive mitigates inability to access the workstation computer. Maybe CC is really like Super Duper?
Anyway, I'll look into CC presently and for now, Disc Utility got the migration job done.😀

Yes, very different in one key aspect. With CCC you wind up with a bootable clone of your drive so you can restart and boot from it to make sure all is well before you go any further. When booted from your clone you should not be able to tell any difference whatsoever compared to being booted from your normal startup drive.

A disk image created with Disk Utility is just a "storage container". It cannot be booted from and has to be opened to even see the files. In a sense it is like a Time Machine backup, as you can restore a drive from it, but cannot first boot from it to make sure the copying of files was done successfully.

 

[sickmacdoc]

You may have misunderstood me. I merely wanted to shift my boot disc data to a different drive and indeed, Disc Utility allowed me to do that. In fact in "Startup Disk" preferences,the new drive has been selected as the start up disc even though the original still shows up. My desire is to now use the first drive as the target for a TimeMachine backup of the new boot drive. Now, in another forum there's the recommendation to use SuperDuper along with time machine to create a bootable archive of a boot drive. Obviously, doing this on an external drive mitigates inability to access the workstation computer. Maybe CC is really like Super Duper?
Anyway, I'll look into CC presently and for now, Disc Utility got the migration job done.😀

Yeah, guess I must have misunderstood. 😕 From looking back at your first post, I thought you just wanted to duplicate the contents of Bay 1 to Bay 2 the simplest way with the drive in Bay 2 being a bootable duplicate. CCC makes that a simple one step process (just like SuperDuper would) with no need to involve Time Machine, so that is why I recommended that.

Generally when recommendations to use both Time Machine and SuperDuper (or CCC, since except for being free CCC is virtually identical to SuperDuper) people are talking about using both in order to create two backups of the drive- one bootable with SD or CCC and another that holds multiple versions of files with TM. A lot of people have had less than spectacular experiences with restoring completely from TM (particularly since it has internal rules that have it skip an indeterminite list of files) so like to have a reliable clone as well. I personally have a little over 4Tb to back up and only let TM back up my boot drive of 250Gb- and even that is cloned every night to another drive along with all the rest with CCC.

Good luck with your setup and hope all goes smooth for you!🙂