Why isn't my time machine backup updating a new drive correctly?

I bought a new larger hard drive and I am trying to use time machine (lion) to restore the new one and copy all my files. I made a Lion startup disk and use the disk utility to erase the new drive and then choose restore from time machine backup. The process runs great and then after about 3 hours it finishes and restarts the computer. Then the white screen with the grey apple and little spinner below it pop up and the spinner just spins forever.
Does anybody know what I am doing wrong? Thanks

It looks like it tries to start loading safe mode and the loading bar appears under the spinning lines under the apple but then the bar gets almost half full and just dissapears. I'm left with just that grey apple screen and the spinning lines again.
The only other startup option that seemed to get me somewhere other than the grey screen is when I hold the "option" key and choose from the hard drive or the dvd drive to boot. I can run from the dvd OS X disk that I made. Is there anything I can do there?

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Transfer Time Machine backups to a new drive

Is there an automated or an easy way to transfer my current Time Machine back ups to the new Time Capsule (I am sure I will inevitably buy it]. Looks like a great system for notebook users but I wouldn't like to start again with time Machine I like having the security of back ups I have already accrued. My current drive is certainly not full and won't be for a while.

So far not very many people have had much success in copying their Time Machine backups to a new drive although the Restore option in Disk Utility ought to be able to do this. However, SuperDuper will support that capability when their new Leopard compatible version is released which should be in a week or so.
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/blog/

HT5096 I need to transfer a time machine backup to a new drive. It keeps failing.

I have a 2TB Time Capsule that I was using for Time Machine for both a MacBook and an iMac. The iMac sparse bundle became corrupted earlier this spring and I was unable to delete it, so I need to reformat the TC. First, however, I need to move the TM sparse bundle for the MacBook to a new drive that I have set up just for TM for the MacBook. After reformatting, I plan to only use the TC for the iMac. I tried moving the sparse bundle tonight to the new drive, following directions listed in several places on this site and on Pondini's site. However, it failed. I am going to guess that it failed b/c I was not hooked up to the TC via ethernet. (I was on WIFI). The new backup drive is a 2TB external that was plugged directly to the MacBook. So, now I have connected them via ethernet. I am again reparing the TC volume using Disk Utility, just to make sure all permissions, etc, are ok before moving. Will I be able to move this file to the new drive easily, or should I plug the new drive directly to the Time Capsule and move it that way (while MacBook is connected via Ethernet).
Alternativey, is there a way to just archive that sparse bundle for the MacBook before I erase the drive?
FYI I am still running Snow Leopard on these machines, but trying to clean up the time machine backups today before installing Lion and moving to iCloud, so time is of the utmost importance here.
Thanks so much!
Kat

OK, this has now failed twice. I repaired the drive using DU and there were no problems (even though it took 2 hours to go thru everything to verify). Right now, the MacBook is connected via Ethernet to the TC. The new TM drive (WD 3TB external, USB 3.0/2.0) is attached to the MacBook via USB. I really need to keep this TM backup for the MacBook and also need to erase the TC. How can I accmplish both? I thought that there was a way to archive a TM sparse bundle?

Moving 1 of 3 Time Machine backups to a new drive?

I have an unpartitioned external hard drive that is the destination for time machine backups for 3 separte computers. I would like to issolate one of these and move it to its own separate hard drive but the only instructions I've been able to uncover for moving backups involves cloning the disk. Is there a way to move only one of these?

Clone the disk and then delete the backups you don't want. Any other method is going to take many times longer and may fail.

Transfer Time Machine Backup To A New Drive

Can I transfer my TM backup from one external drive to another external drive, both drives wired, or do I need to start over with the new drive? I own SuperDuper.

just clone the old TM drive to the new one using Superduper.

I am attempting to restore a time machine backup to a new drive.

I seem to have restored all the files, but the settings arent restore (ie desktop, software settings, where pictures are etc.) how do I restore the settings

See Pondini's TM FAQs, for details.

I am trying to do a full Time Machine Backup to a new external disk. The backup starts, and it says "Time remaining about 4 days." That seems like a very long time, but the real problem is that the computer "logs off" after a few hours, and the b.u. stops

I am trying to do a full Time Machine Backup to a new external disk. The backup starts, and it says "Time remaining about 4 days." That seems like a very long time, but the real problem is that the computer "logs off" after a few hours, and the backup stops. The system preferences are set to "Never" for Computer sleep and Display sleep. The computer does not ordinarily log off automatically, but it has done this twice since I started the Time Machine backup.

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes) in the String Matching text field. You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard." Note the timestamp of the last such message. Clear the text field and scroll back in the log to that time. Select the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear. Copy them (command-C) to the Clipboard. Paste (command-V) into a reply to this message.
If all you see are messages that contain the word "Starting," you didn't clear the search box.
If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don't post many repetitions of the same message.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — anonymize before posting.

Can Time Machine Backup to Two Different Drives?

I have many Apple Computers, and I was wondering if it were possible to have time machine backup to two different drives.
I want it to back up My documents, Mail, and other files/folders that I access often to a partition of my internal drive every minute.
And
I want it to back up Everything on my Mac to my external each night upon connecting it to my mac.
I take my MacBook everywhere with me and I need to make sure that the files I work on the most stay Perfectly Accessible no matter what, and I don't want to sacrifice too much space for that procedure. I would rather just be able to do constant backups of my most used files and folders, and then do a system backup each night to make sure I always have what is needed.

Let me add some more observations. I use two disks, one at home (its a mounted volume on another Mac at home) and the other is a portable disk that I attach to my MBP at work. This works fine.
About your details - TM backs up every hour. If you look around you'll find some posts that give instructions on changing the frequency (I haven't paid attention to these, so I can't help you). However, backing up to another partition on the same drive is not what I'd recommend. If the drive dies, you may lose both partitions.
As for doing constant backups of the most used files and at night doing a system backup - it seems to me you aren't "getting" TM. This sounds like the type of backup strategy one uses with "regular" backup software. I don't think I'd recommend backups every minute, but for short intervals, why not just do a default backup of everything. It doesn't really back up everything, just things that have changed. The only time it does a complete backup is the first time you use it with a specific drive. After that it no longer does complete backups, unless you reformat the drive and start from scratch.

HT201250 existing Time Machine backups to a new Mac

how do i migrate existing time machine backups to a new mac from my time capsule?

It took a little more research, but that link in the end solved my problem. After mounting the Time Capsule and the previous backup sparsebundle, I ran these commands to inherit the old backup (with <capsule> and <machine> representing the names of the Time Capsule and machine/hard drive respectively:
          sudo tmutil inheritbackup /Volumes/<capsule>/<machine>.sparsebundle
          sudo tmutil associatedisk -a / /Volumes/Time\ Machine\ Backups/Backups.backupdb/<machine>/2012-12-09-114511/<machine>
          sudo tmutil setdestination /Volumes/<capsule>/
"2012-12-09-114511" was the latest snapshot that was there. According to the documentation, you can pick any snapshot, since the "-a" in that command will update all of the associated snapshots.

Can I turn off Macbook while Time Capsule is archiving Time Machine backup to a USB drive?

My Time Capsule is archiving my Time Machine backup to a USB drive attached to it. I have initiated this process on my macbook (on the same lan with the Time Capsule), on which I am monitoring the archiving progress on the Airport Utility. Still almost a couple of days to go... Can I turn off my Macbook, or will that interrupt the process of archiving?

If LaPastenague is willing to do a "test", then we will all know more.
Opened my big mouth.
The archive is happening.. I turned off the computer it was setup from.. running Mavericks and latest utility once I got it started. I have been checking from v6 utility on Mountain Lion.. and it is excruciatingly slow. But is running.
I can check the progress but v6 utility is utterly and completely useless.. it continually shows the same numbers.
v5 utility does show it is crawling along.
v6
20min later..
Look, look, there is a tiny blue fleck in the progress bar!!
v5 utility shows the actual progress. Actually tells you total and amount backed up so far.
Amazing how advanced v5 utility is over v6.
The estimate of 10hours is probably correct at the present rate of progress. I suppose for 500GB, around 50GB/hr is about what we expect from TM backups etc.
I will post another picture in an hour and probably kill it then before I die of watching paint dry.

Transfer Time Machine backup from one external drive to another

Surely this has been covered, but I can't find it.
If you have your time machine backup on an external drive and get a new (larger) external drive, what is the best way to transfer the backup from one drive to the other (and define the new drive as the backup drive)? Straight copy ? Then to define the new drive, rename old drive to something else and name new drive the backup name?

I haven't tried this yet but a few other methods are described at http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071128055047339

How Can I Migrate My Time Machine Backups To A New External Hard Drive?

I have a external hard drive that has 500 GBs left, but I want to buy a larger drive.

ivan wrote:
How Can I Migrate My Time Machine Backups To A New External Hard Drive?
I have a external hard drive that has 500 GBs left, but I want to buy a larger drive.
Hi iVain
Fire up *Disk Utility*, click the Restore tab, then drag your old and new TM drives into the Source and Destination fields. Click Restore, and a complete copy of your old TM files will be made on the new drive. Go to TM preferences and select the new drive, and it will continue backing up just as it left off.
Hope this answers your question. See:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2595485&tstart=0

How does one SUCCESSFULLY transfer Time-Machine backup to a new (larger) hard disk drive using OSX 10.5.8

I have read a number of articles about how to transfer a complete Time-Machine backup to a new (larger) hard disk-drive. Some of these articles are specifically for OSX10.6 users, which are not applicable to me since I am operating with OSX 10.5.8.
However, I have tried several times to use the Disk Utility 'Restore' function, dragging my old time-machine volume into the 'Source:' box and my new volume into the 'Destination:' box. This works, of sorts, BUT the newly created volume on the new larger hard disk-drive remains the same size as the original volume on the old Time-Machine HDD, with no apparent way of increasing the new volume's size. So I am not really any better off:
E.g. the total capacity of my new HDD is stated by 'Disk Utility' to be 465.8 GB, of which I'm told 228.2 GB is used for the Backups.backdb folder, but only 4.6 GB of free space is actually available. Yet under the 'Partition' tab of 'Disk Utility' it tells me that there is still 236.4 GB of available space.
Does anyone know how to resolve this issue without upgrading to OSX 10.6?

First, how did you prepare your new drive? See:
Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for PPC Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
If you plan to partition this new drive then be sure you create a larger partition for TM than your old volume.
Next, clone your old TM volume:
Clone using Restore Option of Disk Utility
1. Open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder.
2. Select the destination volume from the left side list.
3. Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.
4.Check the box labeled Erase destination.
5. Select the destination volume from the left side list and drag it to the Destination entry field.
6. Select the source volume from the left side list and drag it to the Source entry field.
7. Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.
Destination means the external backup drive. Source means the internal startup drive.

Can I still use my "old" Mac after restoring Time Machine backup to a new Mac?

Hi guys.
Will I still be able to use my old Macbook Pro 2008 (Leopard) after restoring his latest Time Machine backup on a new Macbook Pro 2012 (Lion)?
Using Setup Assistant and transfering data using Time Machine creats the same Account on the new machine that was on the old one. I just don't know how the old machine will react towards his clone. I don't want to make a mess...
Please let me know.
Thanks

It should work if the drive is connected directly to your Mac. That is not the same as saying that it will work.
Since Mountain Lion was just released, it might make sense to hold on a few weeks and watch the forums for new and unforeseen issues before you dive in.

Errors when transferring my Time Machine backup to an external drive.

Hello,
I need some help transferring my Time Machine backup to an external drive. Let me explain what happened.
I have a Mac OSX Mountain Lion that was upgraded to Mavericks when the upgrade came out. Prior to upgrading, I've been backing up WD Passport Mac with the proprietary software "WD Unlocker on it". It worked flawlessly but after upgrading to Mavericks, I decided to backup and noticed that once i inserted the WD Passport, my screen will flicker, windows will close and reappear.
I decided to read up on this and discovered that Mavericks is not compatible with the "WD Unlocker " program on the Passport drive. Since I already have a backup in place, i decided to restore my computer to factory settings and when I attached the Passport drive with my backup on it, My device will see the backup but it will keep spinning for hours without restoring my backup. I decided to read further on this and I got the same Mavericks compatibility conclusion.
I then copied my entire backups.backupdb folder to my Mac desktop and formatted my WD Passport external drive and got rid of the proprietary software "WD Unlocker".. Once this was completed, I then tried to copy my backups.backupdb folder to my external drive within finder. Each time i tried, i get error messages and permission messages. Even when i changed the permission on the backups.backupdb folder to read & write for everyone, i still get the permissions error.
Please helppppp. I have over 500gb of vital data in my backup.
Thank you.

Since you don't really have a question, I will give you a very broad information source for the next time you have a Time Machine question.
Please visit Pondini's Time Machine FAQ for help with all things Time Machine.
Oh, you cannot use a computer whose only disk drive is the target of a an OS X cloning operation regardless of what software is used for the clone. You can, however, use the source drive except if you try to clone using Disk Utility.

Why isn't my time machine backup updating a new drive correctly?

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