Leopard / Time Machine question

Hiya
Being a Mac virgin, just got a new iMac which has to be replaced. If Time Machine has backed up all my data onto my external HD, how easy is it to restore it all on the new computer when it arrives? Or do I have to back things up manually as well?
Cheers
j

It's not difficult all you have to do is boot to the 10.5 install disk and from the Utilities menu select Restore. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/15638.html However I did attempt to restore my system after I exchanged my iMac but it said that I could not restore. I'm not really sure why it would not work for me but my backup plan was that I had made a Carbon Copy Clone of my system. I find it works well to clone your system to an external drive, then boot to the cloned drive on the new machine and clone the system back to the new drive.http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

Similar Messages

Crashed OS MacBook Lion Time Machine Question

I have an older back up of my MacBook in Time Machine on a external hardrive.
Is is possible to add to the backup in target mode? The computer will not boot right now, but I can get to the volumes via target. I can access the revovery HD when I hold down the option key starting up.
The MacBook has some sort of infixable sibling error, which is getting pregressivly worse. Additionally I've up graded to Lion since the Origional back up and partioned the drive, so it wouldn't really match the origional Time Machine back-up.

I really appreciate both your efforts but let me clarify a few things here before you continue posting incorrect information.
#1 - I have not done anything in the Finder that will hurt anything. Opening a folder in finder is like going to the terminal and running a "ls" command.
#2 - The reason for my original post is becaue this is def. a bug or undocumented feature. Time Machine backups should be backwards compatible.
There is no reason for me to open Time Machine and not be able to open an older backup done in Snow Leopard, UNLESS, it is an expected issue. If this is the expected behavior, the first time one connects the drive, the system should provide some type of warning.
Time Machine displays my older backup dates in Time Machine, but I can't select them to read, restore or anything. Then I went to the finder to open the connected USB drive to confirm if the files were there or not, as my hard drive space is still occupied.
You CAN manually copy files from a Time Machine backup drive. This causes NO ISSUES, unless you start messing with the files that Time Machine uses to organize the data being displayed on the app.
I am a systems engineer, web developer, and systems analyst. I work on multiple operating systems (Unix, Windows, Solaris, Linux all flavors, and Mac OS). I have been working with operating systems since the MS-DOS no-Windows era. There is a very slim chance that I will mess up any operating system, especially OS X.
So, let me re-phrase my question: Is OS X Lion Time Machine backwards compatible or can it not ready Snow Leopard Time Machine generated backup files?
Thank you for any well informed replies.

Can't start with Snow Leopard Time Machine backup in Lion

Hi,
I have seen coverage in MacWorld (http://www.macworld.com/article/161421/2011/07/migrate_time_machine_backup_to_ne w_mac_in_lion.html) of using my Snow Leopard Time Machine backup as the starting point for my Lion TM backup. This saves all my revision history of all my documents and makes them available in Lion. However, when I follow the steps given in the MacWorld article, I don't get the same set of dialog boxes and am never given the option to use a previous disk.
Any hints to getting this to work would be much appreciated.
-Eric

A whole lot about Time Machine for help with TM problems. Also you can select Mac Help from the Finder's Help menu and search for "time machine" to locate articles on how to use TM. See also Mac 101- Time Machine.
Pondini's Time Machine FAQ

Can Yosemite read a snow leopard Time Machine backup

Can Yosemite read a snow leopard Time Machine backup. Once I installed Lion over SL and it was a disaster since I could not get any docs or photos back, so had to put SL back on my old iMac.
Will 10.10 give the same problem or is there a way to migrate the old 10.6.8 data to 10.10?
Thanks

Yes, you can do that. The only limitation is that you can't encrypt the backup volume.

After clean install of Snow Leopard, Time Machine did not restore all files. When I try to restore these files I get "Not enough disk space" error. What do I need to do to get these important files back onto my Mac from my external hard drive??

After clean install of Snow Leopard, Time Machine did not restore all files. When I try to restore these files I get "Not enough disk space" error. What do I need to do to get these important files back onto my Mac from my external hard drive??

Janet.b wrote:
About 3 years old...pretty dated now I guess. Am thinking I may just need to have it upgraded by a Mac tech.
For what the Apple Store's charge you can buy almost buy a new computer.
Just for giggles I brought my old laptop in for a drive upgrade and asked, they wanted $600 for a drive that only cost $120 at the time and it was a slow 5,400 RPM drive. The new Mac's of a similar make were going for $1000.
I did the drive replacement myself, got a faster drive of better quality for $300 instead.
Then another time I asked for a RAM upgrade from 4GB to 8GB, they wanted to charge $400 + $35 for the labor.
The same RAM is on Crucial.com for $90 and all I need is a 00 micro phillips screwdriver.
So you see what's going on here.
I think what you should do, if your out of warranty/AppleCare, is to call up the local PC tech guy who also does Mac's and have them fix you right up.
They can offer more personalized care which you need. Clone your old drive to the new and everything.
With Apple they are overworked at the Genius Bar and just place roadblocks so you buy a new machine instead.
For instance, all new iMac's now have proprietary drive software installed on the hard drives for heat monitoring. So now the only choice a user has is to bring their iMac into a Apple Store for a very expensive drive upgrade, which a person then decides the money is better spent buying a new machine.

Where to Post Time Machine Question?

My question title says it all. How do I find the area in which to post a Time Machine question? Or do I just do it here? Thanks.

There is no place to post a question on Time Machine

Snow Leopard Time Machine process question/possible problem

For starters I want to say that I am not dealing with my own machine, but a friend's, so there's some missing information. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Ok, so my best friend bought a 15" MBP thru me during my short time as an Apple retail employee, which is how I got called in to "fix" it, although I'm still better with PCs than Macs. Anyway, it was purchased around December 2010, has at least Snow Leopard, intel i5 processor, 500 GB HD, not sure if 5000 or 7200 rpm, 4GB RAM. A day or so ago it started acting "weird" he says, like when closing google chrome the color wheel spun forever and took forever to close, and from then on every program acted the same; took forever to open and close. He said it was like there was some major process running in the background that was just using up all of the RAM and processor, leaving him with nothing to use for anything else. He shut it down and restarted it several times, but it acted the same. Sometimes he'd even have to force power it down. He then decided to do a wipe and restore with Time Machine. Thanks to google images I know for sure that he went thru all the bs with selecting what exactly to do, what restore to use, and where to install it, and that the transfer screen with the finder-to-fnder-like image and the progress bar appeared and completed fully before it automatically restarted itself. White screen with Apple logo appeared, he heard the boot up chime/BONG/WALL-E noise before the spinner wheel came up under the logo, which is where it stands now.
The only question/concern is that it has been here for 10 hours, literally. Now the spinner is STILL spinning, that has not frozen that either of us are aware of, but both of us being so new to Macs we are completely unsure if it's ok. I did some online research and I've seen where people have had their macs freeze on boot up, but they usually don't chime; or it took like 14 hours to do the entire restore process, but they were significantly older and slower machines. Like I said, this could be status quo for this process, but I honestly do not know that. Feel free to just say "depending on the amount it's restoring, it could very well take that long, be patient" if that's the honest truth. I'm looking for verification.
PS - his time machine backup is on an external USB hard drive, which is plugged in, and it's from November as he forgets to plug it in, but he has like photoshop and aperture, takes lots of pictures (yes we know those since November are gone), and honestly is on his MBP so much the only way I can think to describe it is that he literally uses it like a cheap whore.
Thank you all!

delete all drivers using the correct un-indtstall software, re-instalthe mac softeware and in stalll. GO TO SYSTEM PREFS, and select the printer and add the printer to the left side for install
, then select that partictular printer.

Question re installing Leopard/Time Machine and my lost Events

I posted a question about my lost Events the other day. I've tried to rebuild my library using Library Manager but so far I still have one event with over 5,000 photos and the few events I've created or re-created since that mysteriously happened.
I really really don't want to go through and organize these over again.
Wondering if I would be able to use Time Machine to go back and restore my events if I were to install Leopard now.

No that wouldn't work. Time machine will not know about anything from before it is installed.
Regards
TD

Snow Leopard and Time Machine question

Running on snow leopard, trying back up files in order to upgrade OS using an external hard drive and time machine. Previously said "don't use" on accident with this hard drive; any way to reverse this?

Hello cinstar,
The following article provides steps for setting up Time Machine. The process of choosing a drive should not omit any drives that have been previously 'ignored' when first connected.
Mac OS X 10.6: Setting up and adjusting Time Machine
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH6299
Cheers,
Allen

Leopard Server Time Machine Questions

We've been running Time Machine to backup client data for about 20 users for a number of months. We've set this up with Time Machine saving to a 750GB RAID 1 external drive mounted as a share point. Each user has a maximum disk quota on the share point (set up using 'edquota'). We now have some questions about how Time Machine is supposed to work:
1) We're starting to get errors that Time Machine has run out of space for individual users. We understood that Time Machine would simply delete the oldest backups and then continue (as it does with standard Time Machine on an individual Mac) but this doesn't seem to happen. Instead we get a warning that there isn't enough space. Is this correct for Server-based Time Machine or is there something we can/should do to make Time Machine behave 'normally' and auto-delete oldest backups to make space for new backups?
2) We've used 'edquota', 'quotacheck' and 'repquota' commands to create our user quotas on a share point. However we can't find any way of removing an individual user's quota completely - it seems we can change their quota but we can't remove them and start again without removing the user completely from the server. Is there any way of resetting and/or removing a user's disk quota on a share point, including clearing down all their data? For example, we have one user that has 3GB of 10GB quota 'in use' even when all their data has been removed manually. There are no hidden folders/files etc. but 'quotacheck says they are still using 3GB!
3) We have an HP Ultrium 960 LTO-3 SCSI tape drive. Does anyone know how we can backup our Time Machine data onto these tapes for off-site archives? We've looked at EMC Retrospect 8.1 but this doesn't seem to work properly with Time Machine data (and seems to be generally flakey!). Does anyone know of general OS X/Unix drivers for this type of device that would allow us to use Unix commands ('tar' etc.). Alternatively can anyone recommend a backup software solution that actually works with Time Machine data?
4) Can anyone recommend a known working solution to keeping long term archives of Time Machine data?
Thanks for any help!

Thanks for a quick response!
We only backup selected client data, excluding system, apps, music, photos etc. i.e. only company data not personal data or general system data (our client systems are built from a common standard build brick). So 10GB-25GB is fine for many months of Time Machine backups for our user population.
We like Time Machine because the user doesn't have to do anything for backing up, it works automatically and the user can recover their 'oops' files without tech support help. So we're keen to get the benefits of Time Machine for several months of immediate backups that users can deal with themselves, but also we'd like some kind of longer term off-site archive capability - this is why we'd like to tape the Time Machine data.
We don't have a working tape solution at present. We have an old Retrospect 6 licence which explicitly does nothing (but complain!) with Time Machine data. We tried a trial licence of Retrospect 8.1 but it seems flakey in general and did not cope reliably with Time Machine data. We wondered about Bru but we'd have to remove Retrospect 6 (which we're keeping in case we need to recover from old archive tapes).
Currently our server is backed up using a combination of techniques:
1) Time Machine of the server itself (system and data)
2) Time Machine of the company data share point onto an external 750GB RAID 1 drive (2 active disks mirrored + 1 spare disk)
3) Weekly 'breaking' of RAID 1 mirror using a spare drive (i.e. weekly rotation of mirror drive)
4) Weekly clones of server system material (but not data) onto FireWire external drive
5) Monthly clone of RAID 1 onto another external FireWire drive (we intend to rotate this with another identical drive)
Can you confirm the situation regarding Time Machine when it runs out of space - how do we get it to 'roll over' old backup data?
Thanks again

Time Machine question.

Hello. Im not sure exactly where to post this, i couldnt find a Time Machine section. Ill make this as short as possible.
I have a 2011 mac mini with snow leopard 10.6.8 and my wife just bought quick books accounting software which requires 10.8 mountain lion, so i just bought it, although i havent installed it yet and here is why. I started another thread the other day about weather or not i HAD to update to Yosemite, all the reviews are making me nervous so im opting for Mountain Lion. So, in my thread a member asked me how i back up my mac mini, well i dont and never have. But i recently got a 1TB external hard drive which im going to return for a 2TB. This member was talking to me about mountain lion and suggested that i install it on my external hard drive so that i could keep my nicely working Snow Leopard as well as having Mountain Lion for my wifes quick book program. As we spoke, the member said he wasnt sure id be able to back up my mac mini with Time Machine onto the 1TB as well as install Mountain Lion onto it and i also plan on putting a few thousand pictures on it. Can someone tell me if this is possible? I know ZERO about time machine and backing up for that matter. Ive never done it. So another question, if i was to back up using Time Machine and a 2TB external hard drive, would that also back up all my photos in iphoto, my photoshop program and Toast editing? Would all of that be backed up? Am i making any sense? LOL.
Thanks.

zowenso wrote:
So, are you saying that I should have a totally different external hard drive to use for time machine back ups?
Would it be safe to store all my pictures and the installation Mountain lion back up on one external hard drive or am I going to have to get a separate one for each?
Also, what if I just did the standard update to mountain lion and didn't save it to an external hard drive? Could I then use one external hard drive for my pictures and the time machine back ups?
Yes. Use a different drive for your Time Machine back ups.
You could use a 2TB external USB drive, partition it into 2-1TB partitions, install OS X Mountain Lion on one and point your Time Machine back ups to the 2nd 1TB partition. I think you should be able to use this 1TB partition for both your Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion Time Machine back ups. Just point each to that 1TB partition. All of your data (photos, music, documents, Quickbooks data, etc.) would be backed up by Time Machine as it backs up the entire drive (OS/Apps/Data). So, if you use that 1TB partition for both back ups, both drives (SL on your Mac Mini and ML on the external 1TB partition) will be backed up.

Time machine questions... how to use with an external drive etc.

Hi,
I am about to start using Time Machine. I have a few questions:
1. Can Time machine be used to restore data and applications / application settings?
2. I have a CalDigit VR eSATA drive which is 1TB RAID 1 which I was going to use as the Time Machine target drive.
Does Time machine store all of its data files in one main folder with many sub folders?
If my TM backup data takes up 600GB on the drive can I safely store other data on the 400GB or is it best to partition the drive HFS+ Journaled 600/400 and leave TM to its own dedicated partition?
3. Does TM keep adding data until it runs out of disk space and only then delete older BUs?
4. Is TM a good backup software for total recovery or is something like SuperDuper better? I would almost never use TM to recover a file that was deleted... but I am looking for a way to protect against data lost in the case of HD failure.

If you haven't found this yet, take a look here: http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/#tutorial=leopardtimemachine
That should give you a rough idea of the "look and feel."
1. Can Time machine be used to restore data and applications / application settings?
Yes, unless you tell it not to, it saves everything (except some system caches, temp files, etc.). If your HD fails, you can recover your entire system to a new/repaired HD via your Leopard install disc (it has the restore utility) and your TM backups. OS, apps (Apple and 3rd-party), preferences, settings, data, the whole system.
Does Time machine store all of its data files in one main folder with many sub folders?
As you may be able to see in the video, the small Finder window is very much like the main one; you can see your data in the same way. TM presents a "picture" that appears to be a full, separate backup of the way your Mac looked at any time. Of course, that's an illusion. It only actually copies files/folders that have been added or changed since the last backup.
You can't tell which items are "real" and which are the "multi-links" representing a file that didn't change on that particular backup.
For more info on the internals: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/12/roadto_mac_os_x_leopard_timemachine.html
3. Does TM keep adding data until it runs out of disk space and only then delete older BUs?
Sort of. After an initial Full backup, it does incrementals (hourly, if you let it). Then it converts the first of the day to a daily backup, which it keeps for a month, and deletes the other hourlies after they're 24 hours old.
After a month, it converts one per week into a weekly backup and deletes the dailies.
It keeps the weeklies until it runs out of room, then begins deleting the oldest. But because of the "multi-links," it doesn't delete it's copy of anything that's still on your internal HD. So it manages it's space and deletions automatically and intelligently.
4. Is TM a good backup software for total recovery or is something like SuperDuper better?
They both have their advantages and disadvantages. Many of us use a clone plus TM. The clone advantage is, of course, being bootable. TM isn't. TM's advantages are the very fast incremental backups (it doesn't have to examine every file and folder to see what's changed): the ability to restore old items; and the ability to restore your entire system to a previous state, even if that's a prior version of Leopard!

Time Machine questions: Handling backups for multiple Macs to one FW drive

I am reviewing the Time Machine thread and seeing a lot of helpful information, but I would like to ask something I haven't quite found yet.
We have 2 Leopard Macs, a MacBook Pro and an intel iMac... with plans to upgrade another MBP from Tiger to Leopard at some point.
In planning for Time Machine, we set up a 1 TB drive, attached it via FW 800 to the iMac, partitioned it GUID for Intel, and made 3 partitions, one for each planned Mac we want to back up to it.
I started Time Machine on the iMac first and the first backup of about 100 gb took maybe 4 hours.
Then we tried to start the Time Machine backup for the MBP over the network (wireless). It was understandably much slower and quit with some error last evening, so I took advantage of the pause to move the notebook to a wired ethernet connection. It got even slower so this morning I directly connected it FW 800, erased what had been backed up, and started over. So far, so good. 6GB out of 100 in 10 minutes or so. The idea being, if we can get the first backup completed faster over wired connection, maybe doing the incrementals over wireless network will be okay. Sounds like some folks are doing that successfully. I am hoping that works out.
Questions: Was it necessary to partition my 1TB drive into a partition for each Mac's Time Machine backup? I did make each partition bigger than the hard drive it is designated for.
To get the MBP to mount the external FW drive on its desktop, I had to disconnect the drive from the iMac. Is there any way I can connect the FW drive to both the MBP and the iMac (the drive has two FW 800 out connections, so it is physically possible)? I'm thinking (from reading posts of others with notebooks) that one strategy is to connect your notebook to your Time Machine drive at night and let it back up, but it'd be great if I could leave the iMac connected while doing so. Is there a way the volumes on the drive can mount on both desktops?
When I try wireless again, I'm seeing mixed posts regarding whether the MBP will need a password to log in to the remote volume each time, or only the first time when the Time Machine backup is established... if I could get clarification on that, it would be helpful.
Thanks!
thanks

What do you see on your notebook when you click on your TimeMachine icon in the Dock?
My notebook is mounting the backup drive on an hourly basis, running a backup, and looking like it is doing something... but when I then look at TimeMachine, I can't see the backups. (On my iMac with the drive directly attached, I see a progression of windows showing all the hourly backups the last 24 hours, etc.) I just called Apple to ask why this is so, and they told me they couldn't help me because wireless Time Machine backups aren't supported.
I know backups to a hard drive attached to an Airport Express Base Station are not supported. But when they say "You can designate just about any HFS+ formatted FireWire or USB drive connected to a Mac as a Time Machine backup drive. +Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices+"... well, how can you DO that?

Upgrade leopard to snow leopard with preexisiting snow leopard time machine backup

I was using an old desktop Mac that had been upgraded to snow leopard from leopard a few years ago. Disk utility said I needed to repair my hard drive using the installation discs. I didn't have the snow leopard installation disc but still had the leopard installation disc which I used. When the computer re-installed leopard onto my hard drive, it created a partition: one with my hard drive running snow leopard, and then a new one with the space left over, running leopard. I got my replacement snow leopard installation discs and would like to delete the leopard partition, and go back to what I had before with the snow leopard drive. I do have a time machine backup (somewhat incomplete) and am making a copy of the physical snow leopard drive. I cannot access the most recent time machine backup since I'm back to running leopard and the time machine backup was made under snow leopard. I'm not sure how to proceed from here to upgrade to snow leopard. When I try to upgrade to snow leopard, I'm asked which destination drive to use. I don't want to use the snow leopard drive, since it would get deleted. So, would the leopard drive be the answer in this case? And what would happen to the contents of my old snow leopard drive? Would I end up with two partitions, both with snow leopard, but one being current (nothing on it) and the other being my old drive? Would I be able to get rid of the current drive and then use only my old drive? Thanks in advance for any help.

First of all, it's unclear to me why you cannot select the old Snow Leopard partition.
I also think you should have been able to repair hard disk using the leopard CD disk without actually installing leopard OSX by using the Utilities only.
Also, Why is your Time Machine backup incomplete? Is that under Leopard or Snow Leopard?
Now you have two partitions with two different OSX (Leopard and Snow Leopard). Your goal is to get back to Snow Leopard.
I going to assume that the original Snow Leopard partition is inoperable (this is also question?) I would upgrade the Leopard partition to Snow Leopard. Afetrwards, use the Migration Assistant to bring in your data, documents, app, and settings. Once complete, you should be able to see your Time Machine backups. If all is ok then you can delete the original Snow Leopard partition.
This is a somewhat complicated situation, so I am issuing a caveat that is my opinion only. Wait until another expert provides input regarding your situation to determine the best course of action.

External Hard Drive/Time Machine Questions

The hard drive on my four-year-old-plus MacBook Pro is apparently failing, and I can't afford a new MacBook Pro yet. So I bought an external hard drive, hoping to clone my hard drive and run my computer off the external hard drive if the main drive crashes.
At the moment I can't afford an Apple external hard drive, so I bought a non-Apple model. So I was surprised when it asked if I wanted to use Time Machine to back up my data while I was setting it up. I chose yes, though I'm not even sure if I've set it up correctly.
OK, let me start from square one...
My external hard drive has 1 TB of storage space, and I initially formatted it in one big block - no partitions. If I want to boot off a cloned hard drive, will I have to partition it, so I'm booting off a particular partition?
If I do have to partition it, I understand I can use Apple's Disc Utilities to do the job. Can anyone tell me if there are any special steps or conventions I need to follow? I'd probably create a partition of about 200 GB for my cloned hard drive. (I'm currently using about 120GB on my internal hard drive.)
In fact, I might make two separate 200-GB partitions, cloning my hard drive to one partition, then cloning it to the second partition a few weeks later, just for security.
My first Time Machine backup is scheduled to begin in just half an hour or so. Will it merely copy all my files to the external hard drive, or will it create an operable clone? Approximately how long do you think this initial backup will take, using firewire?
Also, once I get my hard drive cloned, I'm thinking of booting up with the clone and upgrading to Snow Leopard. If everything works fine, then I'll upgrade my main (internal) hard drive to Snow Leopard as well.
Sorry for all the questions. I think I understand the basics; there are just a surprising number of details to figure out.
When I can afford it, I hope to upgrade to a new MacBook Pro 13" or 15" and an iPad, which I'd like to take to work with me.
Thanks for any tips.

David Blomstrom wrote:
If I want to boot off a cloned hard drive, will I have to partition it, so I'm booting off a particular partition?
yes.
you would need to partition it and use one partition for cloning and the other for TM backups.
i don't recommend such a setup, however. it's like putting all eggs in one basket - if (not when) the external fails, you'd have lost both backups @ the same time !
If I do have to partition it, I understand I can use Apple's Disc Utilities to do the job. Can anyone tell me if there are any special steps or conventions I need to follow?
yes.
you can use the instructions in [this|http://web.me.com/pondini/AppleTips/DU.html] user tip.
I'd probably create a partition of about 200 GB for my cloned hard drive. (I'm currently using about 120GB on my internal hard drive.)
the partition for the clone needs to be just a big as your startup disk (e.g. 120 GB). the partition for TM backups, otoh, would ideally be 2-3 times the size of your startup disk.
more information [here_|http://web.me.com/pondini/TimeMachine/1.html].
Will it merely copy all my files to the external hard drive
it will back up everything on your startup disk unless you specifically exclude files from backups.
or will it create an operable clone?
no.
use software such as _*Carbon Copy Cloner*_ to clone your system.
Approximately how long do you think this initial backup will take, using firewire?
the initial backup could take overnight - depending on how much data is to be backed up.
Also, once I get my hard drive cloned, I'm thinking of booting up with the clone and upgrading to Snow Leopard. If everything works fine, then I'll upgrade my main (internal) hard drive to Snow Leopard as well.
yes, that will work just fine. in fact, some users recommend this technique even if the internal drive is not about to fail - better muck up a clone than the regular startup disk.
JGG

Leopard / Time Machine question

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