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Adam Fratus
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Q: Moving Time Machine: New Hard Drive

I have been using Time Machine on my 500GB USB 2.0 WD My Book for about a month now. I recently purchased a 1TB FW 800 WD My Book and would like to transfer my existing Time Machine backup data from the 500GB to the 1TB drive. There are a few things I am unsure of:

1. How can I make the 1TB drive my Time Machine backup and still have all of the old backups from the 500GB drive?

2. Since my Mac's internal drive is only 600GB, I'd like to allocate only that much space for the Time Machine backups. Am I able to partition the drive and use the other 400GB as storage that's accessible on both Macs and Windows machines?

Thank you to anyone who is willing to help me out.

iMac 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.6.1)

Posted on Sep 29, 2009 12:43 PM

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Adam Fratus

Q: Moving Time Machine: New Hard Drive

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  • by Barry Hemphill,Helpful

    Barry Hemphill Barry Hemphill Sep 29, 2009 1:00 PM in response to Adam Fratus
    Level 8 (38,032 points)
    Peripherals
    Sep 29, 2009 1:00 PM in response to Adam Fratus
    Hello Adam:

    Welcome to Apple discussions.

    A couple of thoughts:

    1. How can I make the 1TB drive my Time Machine backup and still have all of the old backups from the 500GB drive?


    I suggest you instruct TM to make a backup (full) of your system on your new external HD. If you8 think you will need it (probably, not) keep your 500 GB drive for awhile.

    2. Since my Mac's internal drive is only 600GB, I'd like to allocate only that much space for the Time Machine backups. Am I able to partition the drive and use the other 400GB as storage that's accessible on both Macs and Windows machines?


    You can, of course, partition a drive. However, the Windows caveat throws me. I have no clue if you can do what I think you have described.

    Barry

  • by Adam Fratus,

    Adam Fratus Adam Fratus Sep 29, 2009 1:05 PM in response to Barry Hemphill
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Sep 29, 2009 1:05 PM in response to Barry Hemphill
    Barry,

    Thanks for the speedy reply. Making a new full backup on the 1TB and keeping the 500GB in tact for awhile makes sense now; no need to move those old backups if I don't intend on using them. I guess my main concern was with partitioning the drive.

    What I am basically wanting to do is partition my 1TB drive as:

    1 600GB partition for the Time Machine backups
    1 400GB partition as a file format recognized by both OS X and Windows

    Can I just create those partitions and point Time Machine to use the 600GB one and still use the other 400GB partition?

  • by Barry Hemphill,

    Barry Hemphill Barry Hemphill Sep 29, 2009 1:14 PM in response to Adam Fratus
    Level 8 (38,032 points)
    Peripherals
    Sep 29, 2009 1:14 PM in response to Adam Fratus
    Hi again:

    Can I just create those partitions and point Time Machine to use the 600GB one and still use the other 400GB partition?


    Since I do not run Windows anything (and do not intend to) I am not sure.

    I partition my external HD, but I have one partition for TM and one for SuperDuper bootable clones. These articles may be of interest:

    http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/15139.html

    http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/11421.html

    Barry

  • by Pondini,

    Pondini Pondini Sep 29, 2009 1:22 PM in response to Adam Fratus
    Level 8 (38,747 points)
    Sep 29, 2009 1:22 PM in response to Adam Fratus
    Adam Fratus wrote:
    I have been using Time Machine on my 500GB USB 2.0 WD My Book for about a month now. I recently purchased a 1TB FW 800 WD My Book and would like to transfer my existing Time Machine backup data from the 500GB to the 1TB drive. There are a few things I am unsure of:

    1. How can I make the 1TB drive my Time Machine backup and still have all of the old backups from the 500GB drive?


    You can copy them, if you want. Copy the entire Backups.backupdb file via the Finder (Snow Leopard only; not Leopard), or use the Restore tab of Disk Utility as in item #18 of the
    Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip.*

    2. Since my Mac's internal drive is only 600GB, I'd like to allocate only that much space for the Time Machine backups. Am I able to partition the drive and use the other 400GB as storage that's accessible on both Macs and Windows machines?


    That's probably not a good idea. What's important is not the total size of your internal HD, but the amount of data that's on it (and will be on it in the foreseeable future). TM normally needs 2-3 times that much space (see item#1 of the FAQ Tip).

    Make your TM partition first, so it's easier to expand it later on, if need be. Then format the second partition as +FAT 32,+ so both Windoze and OSX can use it. See item 5 in the FAQ Tip for partitioning instructions.

  • by Adam Fratus,

    Adam Fratus Adam Fratus Sep 29, 2009 1:43 PM in response to Pondini
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Sep 29, 2009 1:43 PM in response to Pondini
    Pondini,

    Thanks for those articles, they answered my question about partitioning the drive. Seems like Time Machine will work on a partition. I think I will just format the 500GB as NTFS and use it as a manual backup drive for both OS X (via NTFS-3G driver) and Windows.

    Thanks for the responses!