Replacing Hard Drive and avoiding full Time Machine Backup

Since your current drive is still working, you can use Disk Utility or other popular disk utility programs to just copy/clone your existing drive to the new larger hard drive. Your old drive can serve as a backup for a while.

I understand your question about Time Machine, but I'm not sure what alternative you're looking for.

The only way to avoid TM doing another full backup is by just not plugging it in.

Time Machine, as I understand it, begins with a full backup, and then backs up changed and added files since the initial backup.

If it doesn't begin with a full TM backup as a starting point, how would TM track new files and changes, and then be able to do a full restore if necessary without a full backup at some point?

Message was edited by: kostby

Alf Megson wrote:

. . .

why is it necessary for Time Machine to do a full backup to its backup volume when there already IS a full UP TO DATE backup on that volume, the only difference being, the previous (full incremental) backup was made from the original drive and the subsequent full backup is made from a clone of the original drive and nothing has changed.

Because they're different disks, unfortunately. Even on the same disk, if you do a full restore from Time Machine, or erase and copy everything from a clone, the drive gets a different UUID (Universally Unique IDentifier), which means OSX (and Time Machine) treats it as a different drive.

Sometimes, after doing a full restore, OSX can "follow the breadcrumbs" and figure it out, but still starts out thinking it's going to do a new, full backup. It will delete old backups if necessary, and proceed very, very slowly, but only actually do an incremental backup.

We're hoping it will be improved in Lion. 😟

I totally agree with you, Alf. I just do not see the point of performing a full backup after restoring from a Time Machine backup copy. I have just restored after a disk swap, and TM intends to do a full backup, 400 GB! (my music and photo libraries are huge). I don't want it to erase potentially valuable old backup copies, so I don't know what to do, besides using a new HDD. I hope they solve this issue at Apple soon. By the way, I own an iMac late 2007 + Mac OS X Lion.

Alf, connect the new drive to your mac, use Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper to make a clone onto the new drive. Replace the "old" drive with the new one, repair permissions, and let TM make a new backup (like Pondini said inevitable). If you want to delete all old data on your time machine disk save the new sparseimage backup.

Ahh, why didn't you say that you have upgraded to Lion? We thought you are still on SL !!!

Changing your harddisk will be a bit different now...

But first you have to solve the issues in Lion, first update to 10.7.1 update, which will solve issues with Wifi and som USB issues, and a lot of other small things, then as soon as 10.7.2 update is there istall that update too.

When you want to restore Lion after a problem, startup with the option key, go to the restore disk and restore, then restart normally.

LexSchellings wrote:

Ahh, why didn't you say that you have upgraded to Lion? We thought you are still on SL !!!

Changing your harddisk will be a bit different now...

Yes, the handling of a replaced/restored internal HD has been improved in Lion.

If you use OSX to restore your data (full system restore from Time Machine, or via Setup Assistant or Migration Assistant), Time Machine will automatically "associate" the old backups with the new/restored drive, as those processes leave "breadcrumbs". You'll see a message about "First backup after disk inheritance . . . " in your system.log. The first backup will be longer than usual, but should be an incremental one.

But if you don't put your data back in any of those ways (eg., you restore from a clone), there are no breadcrumbs. You may be able to do it manually, via the new tmutil command in UNIX. See #B6 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

Hi Pondini,

yes we were on the wrong foot (at least I was..).

But you gave the right direction...😎.

Good to see you again.

Lex

Alf, I am sorry that your humour is bad. We in this forum are NOT Apple. You yourself have have experimented while trying to get help here, without telling everything correctly. You can not blame us when those experiments are going wrong. I propose that you restrain yourself and not shout at the people who are trying to help. If you want further help I suggest you start over again, and specify exactly what equipment and software you have and what you have tried already yourself. Direct your emotions elsewhere please.

Lex

Barring the great Pondini who is the TM master...

In my opinion there is but one wrose backup method, that being NO backup at all.

Pondini wrote:

Alf Megson wrote:

. . .

why is it necessary for Time Machine to do a full backup to its backup volume when there already IS a full UP TO DATE backup on that volume, the only difference being, the previous (full incremental) backup was made from the original drive and the subsequent full backup is made from a clone of the original drive and nothing has changed.

Because they're different disks, unfortunately. Even on the same disk, if you do a full restore from Time Machine, or erase and copy everything from a clone, the drive gets a different UUID (Universally Unique IDentifier), which means OSX (and Time Machine) treats it as a different drive.

Sometimes, after doing a full restore, OSX can "follow the breadcrumbs" and figure it out, but still starts out thinking it's going to do a new, full backup. It will delete old backups if necessary, and proceed very, very slowly, but only actually do an incremental backup.

We're hoping it will be improved in Lion. 😟

Thanks Pondini, very good information. I just had two iMac's with failing hard drives within a week. This 27" was still under Apple Care, and got another tiny 1TB 7200 RPM HD installed (don't like the fact that I couldn't upgrade with the Apple Care program). It works great, I did restore both my Main, and Developers partion. Time Machine still hasn't done a successful backup. It looks as if it's working now, (but stuck again at 85 MB out of 670 GB).

So it is doing a full back up, even though there are "breadcrumbs" The Time Machine backup is 3TB, thankfully, so it only deleted 6 months of backups, up to last October. The temporary "package" file during a backup is 1.97 TB right now! This seems a little rediculous on a 670 GB full back up.

On the other iMac (with a 1.5 TB HD, but only 440 GB used) the TimeMachine backup is only 1TB, and it did delete all the previous backups then said I need 530.30 GB, I only have 530.21 GB available. Again, rediculous on a 440 GB Full Backup. So I tried to free up a mere 90 MB by deleting a 142 MB printer software installer from one and only day earlier, and it deleted the entire day of backups, (the original I guess, it's never done a successfull backup since I restored.) So I got another 3 GB. Now it seems to be working, this older iMac (24") is copying around 30MB/s (USB 2.0 speed).

My newer iMac (27") with FireWire 800 Timemachine backup drive is copying somewhere around 300 KB/s (caculated by aproximate average of time divided by 86 MB out of 670 GB copied) Even though I see the activity monitor go up to 68 MB/s writing, the amount copied in the Time Machine System Preference Pane hasn't changed.

I suppose I just included some possibly relevant information to anyone who may be interested in why all there previous backups have been deleted! Remember, by ".inProgress" package file is 1.97 TB on a 670 GB full backup mode (no delta backup as expected).

Can anyone explain why the ".inProgress" package file is so large? It's triple the volume I'm trying to back up. Will my previously deleted backups reappear, are they in the triple size ".inProgress" backup file?

I'm running Lion 10.7.2.

Gator TPK wrote:

. . .

I did restore both my Main, and Developers partion.

How? Did you do a full system restore of the OSX partition, or install OSX and use Setup Assistant?

Time Machine still hasn't done a successful backup. It looks as if it's working now, (but stuck again at 85 MB out of 670 GB).

That may be because it's trying to recover the partial backup. See below.

So it is doing a full back up, even though there are "breadcrumbs"

It shouldn't be doing a full backup of the OSX partition if you restored as above. But it will try to do a full backup of a data-only partition, since there's no way to restore one and leave the trail it needs.

In both cases, you may be able to force it, since you're on Lion, via #B6 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting. You'll have to do the "associate disk" procedure twice - once for the OSX volume (pink box), once for the data-only volume (tan box).

Can anyone explain why the ".inProgress" package file is so large? It's triple the volume I'm trying to back up.

I'm not sure I follow all the back and forth, but it may have copies of things from more than one failed backup, or drives/partitions that shouldn't be backed-up. And/or, it may have gotten corrupted in the process.

I'd suggest deleting that package via the Finder. Emptying the trash will take a very long time, and may give you problems with locked files, permissions, etc. If so, see #E6 in the Troubleshooting article.

Then do the "associate disk" procedures, then try another backup.