Clone vs time machine backup

I am hoping someone can clarify this for me. It has to do with the variations of clone vs time machine back up vs migration assistance. I currently have a mid 2009 13" MBP that I am thinking of giving to my sister and getting myself a brand new MBA 13" due to weight factor. The current MBP is working well. I have a Time Machine backup and a clone of the hard drive.
My understanding is that due to the difference in hardware you would not be able to use a clone from a MBP to move over to a MBA. Same for a Time Machine backup. Migration assistant will move over your documents and settings but not install any of your programs. So on the new MBA I would need to install my programs one by one.
Is there anyway to take some sort of 'clone" of the MBP and move it to the MBA so that all my programs, settings, preferences will just appear? Or am I dreaming here?
Thanks for any help

Scottadel wrote:
 ...Is there anyway to take some sort of 'clone" of the MBP and move it to the MBA so that all my programs, settings, preferences will just appear? Or am I dreaming here?...
There is a way to bring over things that even Setup Assistant won't.
Clone your old system to an external drive, preferably USB 3.0, because of the speed and the fact that the new USB 3.0 equipped Macs can boot from them.
Connect the external drive with the clone to the new MBA and make sure that it mounts. Then reboot and immediately go into Recovery mode (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718). You will be offered an option to install Mountain Lion. Choose that and pick the clone to install ML on. Since the clone is connected to the MBA, the installer will make the ML install compatible with your new computer. Try booting from the external long enough to satisfy yourself that everything is working properly, then clone that to the internal drive on the MBA.
Bonus: you'll already have a bootable backup as well as an external for Time Machine backups.

Similar Messages

  • Can I clone and time machine backup on the same external drive?

    I recently purchased a WD 2 TB external usb drive.  I want to make sure that I have good backups in case my Macbook decides to give up on me.  Should I clone a copy of HD or just time machine backup?  Can i do both on one external hd?

    RobCob wrote:
    I'm honestly only concerned about my photos and music.
    You can Manually Backup your iPhoto Library and your iTunes Library to an External Drive without addition Software.
    How to correctly move your media:
    iTunes: How to move the library to an EHD
    Early iPhoto: How to move the Library to an EHD
    iPhoto '11: Move your iPhoto library to a new location
    iMovie: How to move the Library to an EHD
    It is important that the External Hard Drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended (journaled).

  • Move existing Time Machine backups to new (larger) drive?

    If I get a larger external HD for Time Machine backups, is it possible to move all the existing TM backups from my current drive to the new HD, or do I have to start from scratch?
    Has anyone successfully done this?

    One more question to the Pros here, please
    I perfectly understand how to clone a drive with SuperDuper. But I am unsure about how to clone the Time Machine backup file.
    In Finder's sidebar under SHARED I see the Time Capsule. On Time Capsule I see 2 sparsebundle files, one representing my iMac backup and the other my Powerbook backup, as the names indicate. But in SuperDuper's "Copy" dropdown I am not able to open either of them.
    So I tried a different approach: I activated Time Machine on the Powerbook. A virtual drive labelled "Backup of Powerbook" pops up in Finder. Now I am able to choose this virtual drive in SuperDuper's "Copy" dropdown. I assume that this the correct file to clone?
    Then I would say "to" Disk Image and give it an identical name ("Backup of Powerbook"). Now I should choose the destination where to store the clone. This will be the new USB-HDD that I am going attach to Time Capsule.
    Image type would be "Read/Write sparse image"
    Right?

  • I can't clone (Duplicate) my Time Machine backup properly via Disk Utility

    I have an ext. HDD Time Machine backup sitting beside my 10.8 MBP.
    I want to create an identical ext. HDD Time Machine backup, because it's safe to have 2 identical HDDs backing up my system.
    But when I follow this apple guideline, a problem occurs:
    Time Machine: How to transfer backups from the current backup drive to a new backup drive
    URL: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5096
    The problem is I get a strange path even if I drop "Backups.backupdb" of 3TB1 (The source HDD) onto the root level of 3TB2, the destination HDD (I mean there's nothing in there so I just drag & drop onto the HDD).  And the result is my new ext. HDD eating up about 60GB more space.
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    Why does it alter my file hiearchy like this?
    Please help some high-level Mac guy thanks!

    Why not just use TM to back up to 2 external drives. TM will alternate between the two when it backs up.
    Alternately, you could have a 2 back up strategy like others have using SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner. Both are excellent 3rd party apps to clone your internal drive(s) and both have schedulers.

  • Set up new external drive-clone startup drive alongside Time Machine backup

    I want to clone the boot drive to a 1 TB WD MyBook external (via firewire), using SuperDuper, with the rest of the 1TB drive used for Time Machine backups. I am currently formatting the drive to Mac OS Extended (journaled), and plan to set two partitions. I was planning on setting the first partition to 320 GB, and the remainder to a partition for Time Machine.
    *Do I need to set the first partition to the specified drive size (320 GB), or can I set it to the available capacity (just below 300 MB)?*
    I've read that SuperDuper and Time Machine work nicely side by side - e.g., creating boot clone image, and Time Machine backups. Will Time Machine and SuperDuper work without any issues once the formatting and partitions are completed, or is there some other setup required.
    *Is this accurate?*

    NibblesNBits wrote:
    Thanks for the quick response - I hadn't looked at the FAQ, but the first thing I did after selecting the drive was the same things outlined in step B. This was where the failure was detected. I see in step B, the words "This may not work if the drive is already set up with a non-Apple Partition Map Scheme, such as is used on Windows". *Does "May not work...." mean the "Format Failure" message will be displayed?*
    Yes.
    Anyway, after failing step B, I did set two GUID partitions, which was what steps C and D listed.
    No, that's two different things. The *Partition Map Scheme* applies to the entire drive. If your drive came set up for Windoze, it's probably MBR (Master Boot Record), which will not work with Time Machine.
    And, last night I repeated step B - this morning repeated step C, D, E, F. Again, the only thing that indicated there was a problem was step B.
    Excerpt from FAQ
    B. Select the Erase tab, then confirm. This will erase the entire disk. (If you want, you can select Security Options, then Zero-Out Data to physically erase the entire disk by writing over everything. This will take quite a while, and shouldn't be necessary, especially on a new disk.) This may not work if the drive is already set up with a non-Apple Partition Map Scheme, such as is used on Windows. If that happens, just continue with item C.
    Correct. But you must select GUID in step D, before you get to the Format(s) in step E.
    So, try making only one partition in step C, with GUID, and format it +Mac OS Extended+ in step E. After that completes, you can split that single partition into two (which should be very quick).

  • Carbon Clone and Time Machine: developing a backup plan

    Howdy all!
    This is a second post that sort of flows on from another I have written today
    https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4649740
    I initally put them all together, but they were too rambling and disconnected, so it seemed better to seperate them. The question I have here is how best to organise my backup plan? I have a few ideas, but, basically, want to make sure I get the whole setup right the first time and would appreciate any advice from others that have been down the path before. As I am still waiting for some parts to arrive in the mail, I have a little time to think about how to go about setting up my Mac.
    Basically the setup is:
    Mac Mini 2012, boot drive is a Samsung 256GB 830 series SSD, seconday drive for data is a 1TB mechanical disk. I plan on having all my data on the seconday mechanical disk (photos, movies, music etc) and only the OS and Applications on the SSD. To this end, I understand I only have to move /Users to the mechanical disk to achieve this. I then also have 2x 2TB Western Digital MyBook Essential USB 3 disks for Time Machine backups. I plan on rotating them on a weekly basis (storing the disk not in use in a safe or offsite), and then, depending on costs a cloud backup service for some data (music, photos etc) which I might want to access when im not at home.
    So I have been thinking for a few days now on the benefit of having a Carbon Clone bootable recovery drive. The thinking goes along these lines. As my data is on a seperate drive, and is backed up to Time Machine, in the event of an OS disk failure, I can replace the disk and then point /Users to the new drive, and I can be up and running once I have reinstalled the apps i need. Now, I understand the idea of the Carbon Clone backup is such that it speeds up the time to rebuild the OS disk, but I have to question, how useful is this in reality?
    Consider, I can sit down now and write down all the apps I have needed in the past, install Mac OS, set it up (possibly with a generic admin password), install the apps I need from the App store and DVDs etc and then take a Carbon Clone at this point before any setup of Apps are done. If the apps configuration is backed up in the Time Machine backup (i.e.: the config files exist under /Users) then this is almost workable - in a recovery situation, the CC clone is used to rebuild the OS drive, the config files are pulled from the TM backups, and we're back up and running. Where this fails, is if I have installed (or removed) apps since the CC clone was made. At this point then, is it best to (a) make a new clone when a new app is added/removed or (b) make a note of apps added/removed, which will then have to be reinstalled if a recovery is required. I tend to think the (b) method is best here, as it preserves the integrity of the clone. If the machine has been compromised (malware etc) then remaking the clone, causes the clone to be compromised and hence the reinstalled machine as well. Though this method could be a pain if the machine state has changed somewhat over time. Also, it means that the reinstalled system will be missing updates etc which could be time consuming to apply anyway, so the usefulness of a clone is slightly reduced anyway.
    Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Some days I think having a clone will be useful esp. as most of my software was delivered on CD (Adobe Creative Suite, Office) or are large install bases (XCode), but other days I think, "its not a mission critical machine", i can survive a day without it while I rebuild the install, and so I dont achieve much by having a clone which is likely out-of-date by the time I go to use it.
    Also, in this backup plan, is it best to rely on TM for things like email backup or a dedicated mail backup utility? can a Carbon Clone exist on the same disk as Time Machine uses, or do I need to invest in a new disk or two for the CC clones?
    As I say, I want to make sure I have this machine setup right from the start, and would really appreciate any pointers, tips or advice.

    There is one big advantage of a clone.  You can immediately reboot
    to it and continue working and deal with the regular boot drive faiure,
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    is on another drive.  If you use your computer for work and time
    critical projects, this is a major plus!
    In the case of a hard drive failure/replacement, copying the clone
    to the drive is the fastest way to get the system and all your settings
    back.
    Time Machine and incremental backups have a place as well.  It is best
    suited for "incremental" problems.  Examples are installing an upgrade to
    software that doesn't work or just don't plain like.  With Time Machine it
    is easy to just restore back to the point before the install.
    Something else I do is backup current project files to USB memory sticks.
    If you are using your computer for business, you can never have too many
    backups.  Coralllary 456 of Murphy's Law is the "number of backups that
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  • Data Recovery of Time Machine Backup From a Corrupted Drive

    I had to install 10.2 and 9.2.2 on an internal drive in my 2003 MDD G4 but first I had to reformat it (and wipe out its data) since it did not have OS 9 drivers installed. No problem thinks I since its contents are backed up to my 500 GB Western Digital HD. Installation of 10.2/9.2.2 was successful but when I go back into 10.5.8 to restore the contents of the newly formatted drive the external drive with the Time Machine backup will not mount. It churns and grinds forever and nothing I've tried (after consulting the WD support web site) helps. It is recognized by Disk Utility but that is all.
    Any thoughts on whether/how to recover the lost backup? Many thanks in advance.

    mvaldeslora wrote:
    Well, I am happy to report a happy ending. Turns out DW had crashed but I initiated the procedure again and it was able to rebuild the drive's directory in a couple of hours. Time Machine then recognized the drive and I was able to restore the contents of the drive on which I installed 10.2/9.2.2 earlier in this saga. I will reformat the external WD drive now and see how it performs before I decide whether it's a keeper or not. Thanks for all comments and observations.
    Yay!
    If those are your only backups, please do yourself a favor: do not trust them to that drive! Get a new one, and put TM backups on one, and use the other to regularly update a "clone" or at least home folder backups via CarbonCopyCloner, SuperDuper, or the like.
    Murphy was an optimist!

  • How do I use time machine backup to restore onto a different computer

    I am trying to troubleshoot the best way to back up my Mac.  I have been a mac user since 20009 and always used a time machine.  The two times I have needed it for backup, my computer did not read the portion the backup was.  You could tell under disk utility the space was used.  Just before the need of backup, it was backing up.  So, I am wondering if I  need to use a different method.  I lost all of my Christmas 2015 movies.  My computer did some weird thing with passwords and it needs some resetting I had to do with the support team on the phone.  The support person could not figure out how to access the back up on time capsule.  I noticed the password resetting made my computer name different by putting a 3 behind the name I assigned it. 
    One thought that has crossed my mind is can you use the time machine backup and open it up on a completely different computer? If so, I should have been able to someone access my information.  I would like to know the answer and how do it so I know in case this ever happens again and so that I can rely on this expensive back up machine I have purchased two different times on two different computers and never been able to actually use.

    Are you running Yosemite.. because it is the cause of loads of problems.
    As to opening the TM backup from another computer.. yes you can.
    Please read our TM expert Pondini.
    Q14-17 on restore here.
    http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
    Particularly as you will see Q17 and it will reference the prior info you need.
    I have gone through this with several people.. and I have a post showing a manual file location and restore.
    Can't access old files on time capsule
    But not from Yosemite.. it has its own bunch of bugs.. as mentioned. Good luck with those.
    I also strongly recommend people use a secondary backup method.. there are excellent third party.. I use Carbon Copy Cloner.. it is reasonable price.. $40 based on standard rsync.. and will create either bootable clones to a local drive or sparsebundle on a time capsule etc.
    The bootable clone is the ideal way to recover files. since it is based on a simple computer reboot and then access of files that are in exactly the same place as you left them.. TM backs up in a most complicated manner.
    See how tm works here. The top couple of articles and how it is different to clones. As Pondini suggests.. using both is no bad thing.
    http://pondini.org/TM/Home.html
    This is also useful for yosemite.. it is not working as TM used to.
    Find files in Yosemite.
    https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6681850?searchText=time%20machine%20yosemit e#27139370
    While in Time Machine, press the key combination shift-command-C. The front window will show all mounted volumes. All snapshots should now be accessible. Select the one you want and navigate to the files you want to restore.
    I am not sure why your previous use of TM failed.. In the midst of all its problems it does still work ok.. as mostly people can recover stuff they do.. albeit it needs a lot more messing than is typical Apple.

  • Time Machine backup behavior erratic, now not working at all

    [ Using Lion 10.7.2 on a Macbook Pro 15" with 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB RAM. ]
    The Macbook is connected to our home LAN, and I have been using (since September) a Synology NAS drive on the network which is set up as the Time Machine backup drive. Most of the time for these past months it has been fine; some issues initially with connectivity which were finally solved by using a static IP address for the NAS.
    Recently it did the first strange thing. It had been performing incremental backups as normal, when a message came up saying the backup was unreliable and it needed to carry out a complete new backup. Anyway - no drama - I took it up and plugged it into the router to speed up the transfer (around 200GB on the drive). It worked fine and thereafter it went back to doing incremental backups normally.
    Yesterday morning I noticed it was apparently running and running without progress, clicking on the bar icon revealed that TM was "Preparing Backup"; this state continued for several hours. So I stopped the backup, restarted the machine, and then last night at 22h00 I restarted it - by 08h00 this morning, ten hours later, it was still "Preparing Backup", so clearly something is wrong.
    The NAS drive is accessible, ie.
    - The 'Time Machine Backups' icon for the drive has appeared on the desktop
    ' The 'Diskstation (Time Machine)' is available in Finder under 'shared'
    So this seems to be something to with Lion and/or with Time Machine.
    Considering the infrastructure environment has been stable for months, the IP address of the drive is static, there appear to be no network connectivity problems... I am at a loss as to why now this irritating behaviour and, more to the point, at the moment I cannot make the Mac backup. I would be happy to do another full backup but, really, should not be necessary since this only happened (due to the recently problem) a few weeks back - and anyway what's the point of automated incremental backup if (a) it doesn't work reliably and (b) every 2-3 weeks you have to manually perform a full backup anyway??!!
    Thanks in advance
    Alastair

    Alastair Mac wrote:
    thanks. unfortunately a locally attached drive isn't a option that will work well for me (too long to explain, but it just won't - personal logistics rather than technology issues).
    Are you sure about that? I have a Time Capsule (2nd hand) but I've switched back to a locally attached disk with Lion. Lion's new mobile backups provide some measure of backups when not connected to the backup drive. It protects against accidental deletions, but not hardware failure. Plus, the new bootable recovery partition in Time Machine and encryption tip the balance back in favor of the local drive - for me at least.
    1. does it make sense to you that, until yesterday, it was working fine and then quite suddenly it stopped working?
    I will say that it isn't surprising. There are some changes in Lion that affect networked Time Machine devices. The early versions of Lion got pretty annoying. 10.7.2 seemed to be better. I had to erase my Time Machine drive a couple of times and do new backups when it decided it needed to keep rebuilding the Spotlight index. Unless you connect with Ethernet, the reindexing will never finish. In your case, I would expect a 3rd party, flaky open-source product to perform even worse.
    2. in my specific situation (going around and around "preparing backup" without any progress even in 24hrs of preparing, what can i do to restart the backup process? even if it means doing a clean backup i.e. junking the old one, i would live with it as at present (touch wood) my hard drive is OK and i have no historical version recovery issues.
    With Time Machine, the only quick and easy way to reset things is to erase the Time Machine volume.
    3. did apple / synology reach a point in previous releases of OSX and DSM which was stable and DID work, despite the need to use Netatalk? in other words, if i soldier on patiently, is it likely this will eventually get solved? or will this be a perennial problem? in the end, if twice a year i have to intervene, it doesn't really matter PROVIDED the backup itself is intact should the HD finally die. of course, if i have to intervene every couple of days, i may as well do it all manually.
    I can't really answer that. I used Netatalk briefly several years ago and it scrambled my files. It has certainly improved somewhat, but obviously isn't stable. The part that really annoys me is that the change that Apple introduced in Lion wasn't really new. Apple introduced a more secure version of the AFP protocol 9 years ago. In Lion, all they did was make that more secure protocol the default and disabled the older protocols. There are a number of hacks that have been posted (sometimes by me) about how to set a flag in Lion so that it will continue to use the older protocol.
    Synology seems to have better Mac support that some NAS vendors. Still, there was no reason they had to wait so long to update their software. Developers have had access to Lion for almost a whole year.
    I would expect that companies would be always trying to improve their products, but the evidence doesn't support that assumption. I don't like Netatalk's shady open source extortion practices, but then no one else has stepped up to fund a stable open-source implementation of AppleTalk. People tend to blame Apple but they published the new specifications a decade ago and no one bothered to read them. Why should they care?
    Personally, I think backups are too important to rely on such flaky software. I really like Time Machine but it is pretty complicated. Apple is able to make it functional over a network, but just barely. If you are using a 3rd party NAS, my suggestion would be to use NFS instead and backup with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!. Even if you want to continue to try using Time Machine, a Carbon Copy Cloner backup would be a good thing to have too.

  • Time machine backup from USB stick doesn't work

    Hi all,
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    I'd like to include the USB stick to my Time Machine Backup. The USB Stick is formatted as HFS+. It appears in the list of excluded drives in the Time Machine setup. If I click the 'minus' button to remove it from that list, it goes away, but comes back as soon as I leave the TM setup and reopen it. Accordingly, Time Machine does not generate any backups of the USB stick. The external Backup has enough free space to make a backup, so this should not be the problem.
    Any ideas how I could fix that problem?
    A workaround could be to use a 3rd party tool to backup the library. I tried Carbon Copy Cloner, but CC can not do incremental backups of bundles. Any recommendations?

    I am having the same issue on my macbook air (end 2010)
    I bought a 32gb usb stick and Time Machine always excludes it.
    I assume that Time Machine should be able to backup it.
    Could it be because it is a USB stick and not a USB hard drive ?
    Also as a workaround could be make that a usb stick is reconnized as a hard drive ?
    Any recommendations?
    thanks

  • First time machine backup from MacBook Pro 13" (early 2011) on time capsule is extremely slow - unusable!

    I recently bought a Time Capsule 2TB.
    First I set it up to create a new wifi network parallel to my existing wifi network. The first Time Machine backup on my MBP 13 connected via ethernet cable finished overnight (under 10 hrs for about 150 GB), as expected.
    Then I found that my MBP was logging into my old network more often than to the time capsule network so that backups were not being made regularly. So I re-configured the Time Capsule to extend the exisitng network - all fine. Except that now Time Machine said it couldn't find the existing backup. After trying logging out and in, etc. I eventually deleted that sparsebundle to force Time Machine to start again new.
    Now I get an estimated time of 2 - 3 days for the first backup - even via ethernet cable. Sometimes it hangs up and says something like 4000 days... I can't afford to hook my MBP up to the time capsule or even stay at home for this time to let it finish, and I know it should be faster than that!
    I've tried a few of the tips I found so far in the forums, such as excluding my home folder from Spotlight, or even turning Spotlight off, but nothing has helped so far. Perhaps I missed some important step on the way.
    Can anyone give me a reliable step by tep method to solve this problem. I don't want a geeky workaround, I want to plug in (o better, be in my wifi network) and make the backup work like Time Machine is supposed to do it. And I would like to keep on using Spotlight, too.
    Thanks in advance!
    Robin

    Unless you have a desktop Mac you can back up to over your network, your choices are:
    Spend a bunch on a Time Capsule, kind of a waste if you already have a wireless router.
    Spend $100 or so on an external HD and have some inconvenience until Iomega updates.
    Risk losing all your data.
    It's your call, but a no-brainer to me. 
    Better:  get a portable external.  Once you get the Iomega working, start making regular "clones" to the portable and take it off-site so you're also protected against fire, flood, theft, etc.

  • Trying to use a new, larger external hard drive for my Time Machine backup.  However, every time I start the backup, it gets started then fails.  And, I can't delete the few files that did save on the external.  Sort of a catch 22.  Any ideas?

    Trying to use a new, larger external hard drive for my Time Machine backup.  However, every time I start the backup, it gets started then fails.  And, I can't delete the few files that did save on the external.  Sort of a catch 22.  Any ideas?

    Is it a USB hard drive?  USB hard drives have the problem of not giving full speed if they are hooked up on the same bus as keyboards and mice.  Double check your profiler to make sure that is not a problem.  If it is Firewire, make sure there aren't other firewire devices in use at the same time.  I recommend not only keeping a Time Machine backup, but also a clone, and if you do use Time Machine, to make sure the Time Machine drive or partition is at least twice the size of the original drive.

  • Can I have two Time Machine backup external drives on one Mac?

    I have been using Time Machine for over a year and like it very much. The thought occurred to me that I should buy a new external drive that I can backup to and store at a remote location. I plan on making a backup each week, then taking this new drive to my office. That way, if my house ever burns down, I have a backup at my office too that will be a fairly recent backup.
    When I unplugged my older external drive and tried to launch a backup using the new one, my Mac said it couldn't find my Time Machine drive. Won't it let me backup to two different drives? Or does it always need to backup to the same one?
    Thanks!

    polishedstaple wrote:
    Won't it let me backup to two different drives?
    Yes. All you have to do is tell it you've changed destinations, via +Time Machine Preferences > Select Disk.+ (Use different names for the drives, so you know which one is which.)
    Try not to go too long between "swaps," though. After several days, especially if there's been a large volume of changes, Time Machine might do a new, full backup, instead of an incremental one.
    However, I've learned over the years (mostly the hard way, of course ), never to trust my backups to a single app or piece of hardware: no app is perfect, and all hardware fails, sooner or later.
    Like many here, I keep both full Time Machine backups, plus a "bootable clone" on a separate external HD. I use CarbonCopyCloner, many use the similar SuperDuper. That gives me the best of both types of backups, plus of course a completely separate, independent backup.
    CCC is donationware; SD has a free version, but you need the paid one (about $30) to do updates instead of full replacements, or scheduling. Either is easily found via Google.
    And/or, see Kappy's post on Basic Backup, complete with links to the web sites of each product.

  • Time Machine backup and main drive corrupted. Help! (REWARD OFFERED)

    Here's the deal:
    I have a Macbook Pro and a Mac Mini both runnign Snow Leopard. I use the Mac Mini as a kind of media center / server, it has a few external drives connected to it. On of these drives (1GB) is dedicated to Time Machine, the Mac Mini (80 GB hard drive) backs up to it directly and the Macbook Pro (500 GB hard drive) does it over the network (Time Machine created a sparsebundle). This has worked well for years now. Occasionally I got the error that Time Machine needed to start a new backup because the old one was corrupt. That happened about 2-3 times a year (did the same thing when I backued up via USB). Now about 2 weeks ago, that error came up and I just let the Macbook Pro on overnight and connected the ethernet cable for faster transfer.
    When I woke up, the Macbook Pro didn't respont at all, spinning beachball, no response at all beside mouse movement. I let it do it's thing for another 10 hours (while I was at work) and just held down the power button to power off and restart it. But all I got was the gray-on-gray flashing folder with the question mark in it, that's what you get when the Mac can't find bootable partitions. So I popped in the OSX Snow Leopard install disk, ran disk utility. It saw the hard drive, but no partition (i.e. Machintosh HD) on it. I checked the Time Machine backup and the sparsebundle was 300 GB (the Macbook Pro had 400 GB used, the remaining 100 GB were free). There is no way to restore from an unfinished Time Machine backup...
    First thing I did was clone the internal (Macbook Pro) hard drive to a DMG disk image using DiskDrill (the only program I found that could recognize the drive at all, not even DiskWarrior could). I also bought the exact same hard drive model and partitioned it like the cloned the corrupted hard drive to the new one using ddrescue (a command line tool that doesn't quit upon i/o errors but proceeds and tries to recover as much as it can). It copied everything except 65 kilobytes, the corrupted drive seemed to be physically damaged in a bunch of sectors relatively at the beginning of the disk. Since I had now an exact copy on a fresh, healthy drive, I went crazy trying out Disk Warrior (didn't recognize the drive at all), data rescue, testdisc, p a Windows isk, etc. Only R-Studio (on windows) showed the EFI and Macintosh HD partitions on there, they started and ended on the same sectors on the corrupted drive and its clone. After some research, I figured that the partition table was corrupt so I reformated the clone disk using the OSX Snow Leopard install disk (1 HFS Journaled Partition with GUID Partition table). R-Studio showed the EFI and Macintosh HD on that reformated drive, again, same sectors as before. So I figured I could just copy just the bytes where the Macintosh HD starts from the corrupted drive to the clone (using ddrescue). That worked, after almost 24 hours, I had the clone drive with a "disk1" partition on it that even disk utility could see.
    Now I was able to run Disk Warrior on it, but all it could do was recover a few Application folders (Resource-Folders and lproj-stuff), about 100 MB in total. It couldn't repair more of catalog file apparently. Luckily, Time Machine backed up quite a bit (300 GB out of 400 GB of data) and I was able to manually copy all the Dokuments, Desktop, user Library, Applications, Music, Download and Movies. Unfortunatley, only a little bit of the Pictures folder was copied. iPhoto library (80 to 100 GB) was nowhere to be found, backup must have failed right then. I can salvage the drives (time machine drive, original hard drive with a few broken sectors, DMG-image of that drive, 1-1 copy of that drive with partition table repaired) but that only gives me files with numeric names and today's date on teh JPEGs (instead of the date the picture was taken).
    Is there any way I can recover that iPhoto library? It appears the catalog file got corrupted because the hard drive (only 8 months old...) failed on a few sectors. If I understand it correctly, the catalog file on HFS+ file systems is where the folder structure and file names are stored in a B-Tree. I can't imagine that some i/o error during backup can totally annihilate that file when it was working perfectly before. Here's a few things I want to try out but haven't figured out how so far:
    - Time Machine had to start a new backup. There's plenty of free space on that drive so there's a good chance there's old data left on it. Is there a way to restore files (including file names) and fodlers from deleted time machine backups?
    - Is there any way to re-build that catalog file from what is there left on the original hard drive? I can't imagine 65 kilobytes destroys it all.
    - Are there other ways to recover my iPhoto Library? The raw JPEG (and AVI) files with correct file names or metadata would suffice.
    Thanks in advance for any help, I'll actually reward the person with a working solution, 5 years of photo memories are somewhat important. It really ***** that a failure during a backup destroys that...

    Final Update:
    The catalog file on the original hard drive could not be fixed. Seems like Mac OSX tried to repair the catalog file while the sectors this file resides on failed. To make things worse the partition table was also broken beyond repair, even overwriting the sectors with a new correct partition table didn't help. DiskWarrior found less then 100 MB worth of stuff, mainly Applications folders.
    I recovered pretty much everything from the incomplete Time Machine backup by right-clicking the sparsebundle and browsing through the folders with the long alphanumeric names, looking for the version of the folder with the most files in there. All I was missing was part of the ~/Pictures folder, i.e. photobooth pictures and the whole iPhoto Library. My best option was to recover these files using data recovery tools.
    DiskDrill proved to be the absolute best, fast, responsive, efficient, and the only one able to mount the DMG-file with no valid file system on it. As there were many i/o errors and broken sectors on the original hard drive, I made a copy of it using a free command line tool called ddrescue (the standard dd tool just aborted when it encountered the i/o error). ddrescue copied the whole drive to a DMG image, I had 56 kilobytes with errors on the first pass, but it managed to shrink that down to just 4 kilobytes (wow!) after the second pass where it tries to re-read the broken secors. It took about 24 hours for a 512 GB 2.5" drive (5400 rpm) but well worth it. Be advised that ddrescue is really persistent and tries everything to recover those last errorneous bytes. At the very end of the process, the read/write head of the hard drive just goes wild trying to catch the data on the sectors with different momentum. This works but I assume this is pretty damaging for the original drive. I also copied it all to a new hard drive (again using ddrescue) and tried partition and catalog repair tools on that (DiskWarrion, testdiks, pdisk, etc.). Still no hint of a good result.
    I made a deep scan on the clone hard drive with DiskDrill. At the end (after about 8 hours over USB) it found 13 partition (I assume that's the Macintosh HD, EFI and some DMG files lying around) and  hundreds of thousands of pictures. I restored some JPG files just to check the quality, some were damaged, some were good with all the EXIF data intact. I just made it copy all JPG files into a folder. I know the pictures taken from my camera produce JPGs larger than 1 MB and smaller than 5 MB, so I sorted them by size and moved the smaller and larger files into seperate folders. I took the remaining folder (100 GB) and just dragged it into iPhoto. It imported them overnight. Auto-Split by events and I got my library back, alas with different file names, originals and edited versions side by side, lots of duplicates, some damaged, some not. But hey, all the pictures in chronological order. Okay there was also one large event with all the JPGs without valid EXIF data landed inside, iPhoto just takes the file creation date (i.e. the date where the recovered file was copied). As far as I can tell, these are all just data corpses, halfway overwritten copies, random pictures from the internet, desktop pictures, etc.
    I started to work my way back through the events, deleting the duplicates and renaming the events. There's an app called "Duplicate Annihilator" which apparently can find duplicate pictures in iPhoto and mark them for you. The free version only does 500 pictures but if it works, I'll get the full version. It can mark th eduplicate photos by adding something to the picture comment in iPhoto so you can manually review it all. Good stuff!

  • Can I clone my Time Machine hard drive, to another HD, and store Off Site?

    Good day All, I love my new Macbook, but am trying to come up with a foolproof method of backing up all my data, documents, and business.
    I have become very nervous about BACKUPS, and want to have an OFF-SITE week old backup done on a external Hard Drive?
    I presently have a 200 gig Time Machine backup/archive, and have a daily clone with Super Duper & Carbon Copy Clone. However these hard drives are at home, so should the building burn down, or should we get broken into, there goes my business and digital life.
    My thought is to buy an external hard drive and clone my current Time Machine hard drive to the external on a weekly basis, and store it off-site or at a friends house.
    Would I be able to do a clone of my TM HD archive, and have it still useable / bootable / recoverable should a tragedy happen?
    I would like to upload it all up to Mozy, or BackBlaze, or similar offering, but 200 gig is way too big.
    Is anybody cloning a Time Machine hard drive and able to restore from it?
    Thanks for reading my post, and am lookin forward to all of your comments, IAN...

    Hi Ian,
    Sorry I missed the discussion last night. I'll tell you how I'm accomplishing the backup task and you can let me know if this is what you're trying to do.
    I now have 2 external HDs. A 1TB Seagate and a 250 GB LaCie. The LaCie used to be my TM backup drive, but it was the same size as my internal iMac drive. I knew I'd eventually need a bigger drive so I bought the 1TB Seagate yesterday and cloned the LaCie drive onto it using SuperDuper. The only thing on the LaCie drive was TM backups. Now the TM backup are on the Seagate. I unmounted the old TM drive and changed the name of the new drive to "Time Machine". I activated TM and it picked right up where it left off. I did test it by restoring an old file. I also changed a current file and made sure TM was still operating as advertised. Everything worked as expected.
    Now I simply used the 250 GB drive to clone my system HD using CCC. It is a bootable backup and can be used to run the system should my internal drive become unusable. I will update this drive once a month with any changes to the system drive using CCC and keep it off-site in a safe deposit box in the meantime. Using this methodology, I don't see why you'd want to swap the drives weekly/monthly. Just let TM run on the large drive and keep the other drive as current as you like. I've decided monthly is good for me. I'm mostly worried about photos, but I keep them on the camera longer than a month, so there's my cover for the month.
    Nano

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