How do I migrate external drive without wiping Time machine?

I bought a new external drive that is a bigger for all my media files. I back them up via time machine. I don't want time machine to treat this new drive as new files because that'll waste all the space in the time machine drive. How do I tell time machine to treat content in this new drive the same as the old one?

How do I tell time machine to treat content in this new drive the same as the old one?
You can't. The most that you can do is to copy the Time Machine backup from the old backup drive to the new one. If that's what you want to do, continue as follows.
Although the documentation says you can copy Time Machine backups in the Finder, it's very slow and sometimes doesn't work at all.
Launch Disk Utility, open the built-in help, and search for the term "Duplicate." Follow the instructions. Turn Time Machine OFF in its preference pane while copying the volume.

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How to format an external drive used for time machine

My 150 Gig external hard drive showed too full for a time machine backup. It only showed 20 gig left. So I moved the time machine backup on it to the trash to make room for a new one. This did nothing. With the files in the trash the drive still shows full even though it has no time machine backup on it.
So I would like to know how I can format this drive again to get it to accept a brand new time machine backup. Or how do I get time machine to recognize the drive as empty instead of full.
I now know I should have at least a 500 gig drive to let time machine make it's plethora of backups. But the 150 gig drive is what I have right now to backup an 80 gig hard drive and I would like to start from scratch.
Thanks,
JJ Bula

With the files in the trash the drive still shows full
You need to empty the Trash before anything is actually removed from the drive.
If you want to completely erase the drive, launch Disk Utility, select the drive, go to the Erase pane and click "Erase".

Since you can no longer backup to disk, how to restore from external drive without losing all ratings and playlists

since you can no longer backup to disk, how to restore from external drive without losing all ratings and playlists?

My own opinion is that you should install the later appropriate version of Silverkeeper. That said, I would in fact recommend if you can wait a few days for an answer, that you email the La Cie Silverkeeper backup team via the email link on the site at http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/
They are careful to say they are not officially providing a backup service, but when I emailed them with a query regarding usage about a year ago after downloading Silverkeeper for myself, I got a reply within a couple of days that cleared up my question.

External Drive Stolen with Time Machine Back Ups

Hello,
Sorry if this has been posted before. I scanned through a few pages of posts and didn't see anything.
My home was burglarized and they took my G5, Cinema Display and my 500GB external drive with my Time Machine backup data. My question is: How secure is the data on the external drive? Can the theif just plug in the drive and see all of the files or does TM password protected? My G5 was password protected to log in to it. Does that log in transfer to the TM files?
Thanks!
DH

As Donald says, the data can be accessed.
Your backups are as secure (or insecure) as your Mac -- if someone steals either, they can get at your data fairly easily, if they know what they're doing, unless it's encrypted.
It is harder to get at Time Machine backups on an external drive, because Windoze can't read it; you'd have to use a Mac (running Leopard or Snow Leopard) to access it.
But most theft is not for your data; it's to resell the hardware.

HT201250 Hi, I hope this question won't seem too basic but if I want to use a new larger external drive for my time machine backups, will it do a new full backup the first time I plug it in and if so, do I really need all the old backups on my smaller ext

Hi, I hope this question won't seem too basic but if I want to use a new larger external drive for my time machine backups, will it do a new full backup the first time I plug it in and if so, do I really need all the old backups on my smaller external drive?

50maz wrote:
Hi, I hope this question won't seem too basic but if I want to use a new larger external drive for my time machine backups, will it do a new full backup the first time I plug it in
Yes, it will do a full backup.
and if so, do I really need all the old backups on my smaller external drive?
Only if you want to be able to go back in time to those previous Time Machine backups. When you plug in the new larger external drive, you will only be able to go back as far as the first day you plugged it in and ran the first Time Machine backup on it.

Hi, I have a macbook pro with a new hard drive installed. My WD external drive backup on time machine now wont let me access the files. I get a prompt saying 'you do not have permission to access the files'

hi, I have a macbook pro with a new hard drive installed and restored. My WD external drive backup on time machine now wont let me access the files. I get a prompt saying 'you do not have permission to access the files' After my new drive was installed I plugged in time machine and it started backing up. I paused it when I realised that it was running for more than a few minutes. I now realise that it probably started backing up the new hard drive all over again. Which makes me think that the original back up must be on the WD back I cant seem to access it. Any ideas would be helpful.

See E-10 in the first link.
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems

Is their another way like to use my time capsule as an external drive not using time machine?thanks

is their another way like to use my time capsule as an external drive not using time machine?thanks

You do not have to use Time Machine.. but the TC is hardly suitable for a NAS.. it has no means to back itself up and is relatively slow. Still that is up to you..
CCC or Superduper are good backup softwares .. and there are a number of others.

Use external drive for both Time Machine and storage for Back to My Mac

Hi all,
I have been "a Mac" now for over a year and just keep finding cool new things that make me happy I switched. The latest thing is Back to My Mac offered with my Mobile Me account. With a rather convoluted mix of PC/Mac/iOS devices to manage - best $99 I ever spent btw...
I also have a 1TB Time Capsule that I have been using with Time Machine to back up all four of my Mac computers at home. Needless to say, the 1TB is really struggling to handle the amount of data being backed up and certainly leaves no room for anything else.
What I wanted to do was to attach a larger external hard drive via a powered hub to the USB port on the Time Capsule and use it for Time Machine backups while using the internal 1TB drive with Back to My Mac so that I can have remote access to all my data from anywhere without having to leave my computer running at home all the time in order for my laptop to "see" it when I'm away. And, yes, the amount of that data far exceeds what any level of Mobile Me subscription can offer! I should also mention that the hard drive is the only USB device connected through the hub to the Time Capsule at the moment. There are no other devices that might be "getting in the way".
I'm thinking maybe all this is asking too much without the addition of a dedicated file server (Mac Mini, perhaps - not a purchase my budget wants to make).
I understand that the Time Capsule doesn't support partitions, so I bought a Western Digital 2TB Elements drive, connected it to my Macbook Pro and used Disk Utility to reformat the drive from the incompatible NTFS it shipped in to a single, Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition. I then made two folders on the drive, one for Time Machine backups and one for Back to My Mac remote storage/access. Great.
However, when I connected the 2TB drive to my Time Capsule I could not see it at all. Time Capsule was reporting problems in the way of a disk error. From within my Airport Utility, I could see the trouble was the external drive. The utility suggested connecting the drive to a Mac and using it's Disk Utility to troubleshoot.
I followed through, checking the disk, etc. and ended up reformatted the drive on my Macbook Pro yet again with the same specifications as before but without the folders and reconnected it to the Time Capsule. Same deal. But now, I can't even remotely connect to the Time Capsule at all. I can see the Time Capsule in the shared area of my Macbook's Finder but can not connect. The connection tries and fails even before it gets to asking me for username and password credentials.
Long story short, first of all, I suppose I would like to know if I'm asking for the impossible?
Second, if what I want to do *is* possible, what steps do I need to take to make it so?
Thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions you might have.

Well, I have now reformatted/partitioned my poor WD Elements 2TB drive about a dozen times as well as restarted my 1TB Time Capsule so many times it's no wonder it's as confused as I am! <G>
Last night, at your suggestion, William, and in respect for your continued support, I tried creating two 1TB Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partitions on the WD external USB drive, both with GUID partition tables. Both volumes mounted to my laptop's desktop flawlessly and without issue.
Once the external drive was connected to the Time Capsule, however, it was a crap shoot as to whether or not the drive was recognized at all, reporting a problem with the disk, or, even at one point, mounting one of the two volumes but not both. <sigh>
I read somewhere on the Internet that you need to restart the Time Capsule for volumes on an external USB drive to be recognized.
So I tried that. I connected the freshly partitioned/formatted disk to the Time Capsule and restarted it. This succeed in removing the issue of reporting a nameless drive with a capacity of 0MB. It then reported the drive with its correct name but would not recognize whatever volumes in whatever partitions that particular crack at it contained with the exception of the once, as I mentioned above, when only one of two volumes mounted correctly and was listed with the right name and capacity on the Time Capusule's Setup's Disk tab.
At this point I have given up on my goal to use the external drive with Time Machine to back up my Macs or to hope I will ever be able to see its contents remotely via Back to My Mac. All I would like to do now is simply find a reason why I can't get it successfully connected and playing nice with my Time Capsule in the first place!
Any further suggestions or advice as to what steps I might take next would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you all.

How can i put music drive AND a time machine drive on wireless network?

Right now I have a MacBook with ONE external drive with my music and movies… and ANOTHERexternal drive for my backups.
I would LOVE to figure out how to hook both the music drive and the time machine drive to a wireless router so the only plug I have for my laptop is the power plug.
I already have a NetGear wireless router… but it only has ethernet ports out, no usb.
What would be the best/easiest way to network these two external hard drives?
tx!

Another option, where you can still utilize your existing drives, is to consider a dedicated NAS device that supports both Time Machine and iTunes functions. One such NAS device is the Synology DS415+. It would be far superior than what you have now. Albeit at an additional cost.

How do I revert a drive from a Time Machine disk to a completely empty, unused disk?

Hello,
I was performing my first Time Machine backup and my SATA controller failed on my Macbook Pro's motherboard, rendering internal drives inaccessible. The backup that was in-progress at the time had only completed a small percentage of the image and is useless. I am trying to install OSX onto the external drive so my computer will function for the time being, but OSX will not allow the installation because the disk has been reserved as a Time Machine only drive.
I tried erasing the external drive through Disk Utilities, but even after a full erase (went over all data with 0's), it is still showing up as a Time Machine partition. I was able to partition the drive into to two, installing OSX on the second partition and that is how I am running now, but I would like to recover that space that Time Machine has stolen.
Any idea's on how to release Time Machine's grasp on my disk?
Thanks!

There was the one incomplete Time Machine backup. The OS installer says that it cannot install onto a drive used for Time Machine. I have attempted to fully erase everything on that disk through Disk Utilities, even zeroing out the disk, but the installer still recognizes it as the Time Machine drive.

Using toshiba canvio hard drive without using time machine

Has anyone used the Toshiba Canvio external hard drive to save files to without using time machine? I want to move files off of my computer onto the external drive not just duplicate all the files on my computer as a backup.

I guess the external drive is hanging off the Mac..
Getting access to the drive from PC should be possible.. you may need to move public directory onto the external drive and then set up permissions to do it.. I have not done it and simply would not do it.
External hdd are cheap enough buy one for the pc.. That is then formatted NTFS which windows is going to natively read.. this will be much easier if the backups are ever required than to use HFS+ formatted disk hanging off the Mac.
You can also get your dead TC fixed.
https://sites.google.com/site/lapastenague/a-deconstruction-of-routers-and-modem s/apple-time-capsule-repairers

I have suddenly become unable to access photo library iPhoto (vers 9.5) on my external drive. And time Machine will no longer back up to the same external (LaCie) drive. Appreciate all suggestions. The drive does show up on my desktop....

I have suddenly become unable to access photo library (iPhoto vers 9.5) on my external hard drive. Also time machine isnt backing up to same external hard drive (LaCie). The drive does show up on the desk top, but when i open iPhoto the library isnt listed, so I cant option click.

First, one should not try to run an iPhoto library from the same volume/drive that is being used by Time Machine for backups. TM will continue to fill up the drive thus squeezing out iPhoto from being able to be opened and used. Also that doesn't allow you to let TM backup your library as it does with other files on your boot drive.
If you partition the EHD into two separate partitions you can run the library from it but that won't let TM backup the library which is important.
Are you able to see the library on the EHD via the Finder? If so copy it back to your boot drive and open it there. You may have to do some fixing on it.
Solution is to either run the library from the boot drive or get a second EHD to run the library from and let TM back it up along with your boot drive.
OT

Is it possible to rename an external drive without wiping it?

Hello
One of my three external USB drives houses my iTunes library. However, I originally intended to use this drive for backup, so I called it 'Time Machine' when I originally formatted it. I have now bought another drive for backup, so would like to change the name of the first drive, without causing either iTunes or the Mac OS to have a nervous breakdown. What should/ can I do?
Thanks

Hello, Cameron.
I think you could just rename the drive in Finder and then change the location of your iTunes library to it's location on the renamed drive.
When iTunes cannot find your library on the drive with the old name, it will ask you to either create a new library or choose an existing library, so you will want to choose your existing library on your renamed disk.
I hope this answers your question.
Good luck!

HT201250 How to retrieve external drive backups from time machine on hard drive without external drive connected

I am keeping my work files on an external drive which are backed up using Time Machine onto my computer's hard drive. I set it up this way so I can take my actual work drive with me if I need it. However, I just noticed that I can't see any of those files in time machine if the drive itself isn't plugged in, which makes this method useless. Is there any way to get to those, or do I need to reconfigure my backup system? I always thought if something happened to my hard drive I'd have a backup, but that won't work if I can't get to the files.

See Pondini's TM FAQs, for starters.

I am using an external drive for a time machine backup. It has disappeared from the desktop. How do I get it back again?

My time machine backup disc, which has been working ok for a couple of years has suddenly disappeared from the desktop. The time machine program tels me it is unavailable. I have checked that the drive is working by booting up in Windows. and Windows can see it and read it ok. What has gone wrong, and how can I fix it?
I have tried unplugging it and reconnecting, but it is still apparently not seen by the system.
I could use Windows to reformat it, and start again, but this would loose all my previous backups, and I've no guarantee that the system would notice it even then.
Has anyone any ideas?

I think it's formatted on FAT 32 system, but I'm not sure. It's been working for a couple of years so far without any problems, so I think it must be compatible with Mac. The problem is that all of a sudden, the Mac doesn't acknowledge that it is present.

How do I migrate external drive without wiping Time machine?

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