My TC is full and I have purchased a Seagate 4TBexternal hard drive. I don't wish to throw the TC away, given it has years of data still on it! What is the best process to do next? Disconnect the TC and then connect the Seagate and use Time Machine?
thx
Why don't you just power off the TC and disconnect any cables from the TC and set it aside.
In the very unlikely event that you might need to go back and retrieve some files from the old backups on the TC, you can hook up the TC again.
After a month or so when you find that you don't really need any of the old data on the TC because you have current backups of your Mac on the Seagate hard drive, you might decide to sell the TC on eBay or donate it.
In that case, you would erase the TC hard drive and reset the TC back to default settings, so the person who has the TC will not be able to access any of the information that was on the TC.
If you want some help on the Seagate hard drive, we still need the model number to understand more about it.
This appears to be a standard USB drive, so you would........
Connect the Seagate drive to a USB port on the Mac
Power up the drive
Click the Time Machine "clock" icon at the top of the Mac's screen
Click Open Time Machine Preferences
Click Add or Remove Disk, or it might read Select Disk
Click on the Seagate drive to highlight it
Click Use Disk
If the drive is not yet formatted for Mac, Time Machine will first format the drive before the first backup will begin.
The first questions here would be to clarify what you mean by "retire" the Time Capsule as far as what you want to do with the data that is currently stored on the TC disk.
Do you want to leave it there?
Do you want to erase the data on the disk?
The next questions would be what you want to do with the stored network settings on the TC.
Do you want to leave them "as is"?
Do you want to erase the network settings and reset the TC back to its original default settings?
Once you decide what you want to do with the data on the TC disk and network settings and have completed the tasks, you would disconnect the TC from the network by powering off the TC and removing any cables that might have been connected to the TC.
Unfortunately, we probably cannot provide much help for a Seagate product on a support forum for Apple products, but if you could provide the model number of the Seagate hard drive, that might provide some clues that would give us a better idea on how to use Time Machine on your Mac to back up the data on the Mac to the Seagate hard drive.
Bob, I guess what I'm looking for is "Best Practices"? Or what would you suggest I do with the TC? Like I stated I have a Seagate ext HD with 4TB. I'm using Time Machine to do my backups now on a weekly basis. Should I copy all of the TC backups onto the Seagate or should I just leave it there until I need it? I just didn't want TM to write over "old data" on the TC. Thats why I went out and purchased a new external hard drive.
The Seagate is a "Backup Plus model. 4TB and works with MAC OS.
Thx Bob....I think I will most likely give it to a neighbour who's son is attending his first year University!!
I want to retire my Time Capsule(its full 2TB), what is the correct way to retire it
