brander43
Level 1
(0 points)
Q: Time Machine - continuing backups on a larger drive - without doing a full backup again?
After I moved all my old backup data to a new and bigger drive I had expected Time Machine (TM) to just continue where we left it when the smaller drive was flagged as full. Instead it seems TM took a full backup taking a lot of space for backups that already existed among the data moved from the smaller disk?
This sort of destroys the concept of TM "incremental forever" which I had assumed could survive a move of backup data from a smaller to a larger disk?
If I have missed something along the way I would like to be reminded ...
iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)
brander43
Level 1
(0 points)
Mike,
Thanks for all the pointers .... I tried to follow the points in your document.
I am using a directly connected FireWire device (A) for TM.
Per your suggestion I reran the process and verified the A device using Disk Utility. There were no errors of any kind.
Then I moved (or rather copied - per HT202380 ) all the backup data from A device to the larger disk B.
The B device is a USB3 device. It took about 24 hours to do the copying.
I then moved the B disk and defined it as a TM-disk using a slightly different volume name.
Then I attempted to do a backup. A full backup was performed - some 650 GB of data was backed.
I could certainly see the date-line in the TM interface going back to the earliest versions of backups that existed on the A device.
But the latest backup entry was indeed exceeding 650 GB of data, which is what I had hoped to avoid.
My question is why this is necessary and if there is another way yo do this. I could not see this in your message.
Or is this an intended design ("works as designed") in OSX -Time Machine?
Anders
