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New SSD with Time Machine

Hi All,

I've just managed to install a ssd in my imac 5k (2015 (feeling particularly pleased with myself, I have to say....)). It has a different name to my previous, it's called "iMac SSD"(not very original....). Both the old ("iMac HDD")and new drives are 1tb as is the Time Machine backup drive.

Will I get problems when I run time machine? Will it delete lots of my old backups ( as space is an issue?)

At the moment my oldHD/newSSD is on about 550g and the time machine now deletes older backups to make room.

Thanks

G



iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Jan 2, 2020 2:52 PM

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Posted on Jan 2, 2020 3:29 PM

Your Time Machine backup drive should be ~ 4 times the size of the disk you are backing up, or even larger. Your new internal drive will look like it has a lot of "new" files to back up to Time Machine, so you can expect the first backup to take a long time and take up a lot of space. I suggest that you "archive" the existing Time Machine disk and get a new, much larger one and start a new Time Machine backup sequence with the new backup disk. A 4 TB external drive should cost less than $100.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 2, 2020 3:29 PM in response to granger morton

Your Time Machine backup drive should be ~ 4 times the size of the disk you are backing up, or even larger. Your new internal drive will look like it has a lot of "new" files to back up to Time Machine, so you can expect the first backup to take a long time and take up a lot of space. I suggest that you "archive" the existing Time Machine disk and get a new, much larger one and start a new Time Machine backup sequence with the new backup disk. A 4 TB external drive should cost less than $100.

Jan 4, 2020 8:28 PM in response to granger morton

The drives are identified by a hardware address, not just by the name that you give the drive. BdAqua provided some links which were written some years ago for much older operating systems, but they provide ways you can try to force Time Machine to inherit the existing backups. I don't know if those methods will work with High Sierra, but they might. Apple recommends that the backup drive be several times larger than the drive being backed up, it's not just to have backups going back ~ years, it is because the normal backup and versioning process can quickly require much more space than you are using on your drive.


I respectfully urge you to allocate your resources (budget-wise) to put very high priority on having a reliable backup process. For computers and associated equipment, it's not a matter of if they will fail, it's just a matter of when they will fail.

New SSD with Time Machine

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