The hard drive in my iMac (Lion) is failing. I cloned it to a new drive and installed it in the iMac. Now the system wants to start fresh with a whole new Time Machine backup.
It seems obvious that there must be a way to keep using the existing Time Machine backup set, but I can't figure out how to do it. Help, please.
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2), 20" mid-2007 Aluminum
If you had done a full system restore from Time Machine, it would have been done automatically. But 3rd-party cloning apps don't leave a "trail" so Time Machine can figure out that the new drive has all the old stuff on it.
Effective with Lion, there is a way to "associate" the new drive with the backups of the old one, but it requires the use of Terminal. See #B6 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting. As noted though, this only works on directly-connected backup drives, not backups made over a network.
If you had done a full system restore from Time Machine, it would have been done automatically. But 3rd-party cloning apps don't leave a "trail" so Time Machine can figure out that the new drive has all the old stuff on it.
Effective with Lion, there is a way to "associate" the new drive with the backups of the old one, but it requires the use of Terminal. See #B6 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting. As noted though, this only works on directly-connected backup drives, not backups made over a network.
Exactly what I needed. Thank you!
How to keep using existing Time Machine backup after replacing main hard drive
