Making Time Machine "Forget" a Drive

Ok - I've been having this problem under Lion and now Mountain Lion, and its very frustrating.
I have a desktop 2TB drive, dedicated solely to Time Machine. I have a portable 1TB bus powered drive that I use as well. At one point, I used the portable bus powered as my backup drive, later getting the 2TB drive. I told Time Machine to NOT use the 1TB drive, and to use the 2TB drive instead. I then deleted the Backups.backupdb folder from the original 1TB drive, and emptied the trash. Which is another issue - it never wants to empty more than 10 files at a time!
Anyway, the issue is this. If I ever connect the 1TB drive by itself - its bus powered and I carry it with me on the road - Time Machine always wants to start backing up to it (the 1TB). And will show that it is a selected drive in the preferences as well! Under Mountain Lion, I added BOTH, and let it backup to both for a while, then removed the 1TB drive again, and hoped that this would "remove" the drive from Time Machine. No dice. It just backed up to the drive again - even though it only shows the 2TB drive as a backup volume if I unmount and remount both drives.
Help! Short of deleting 18 months of backups from the 2TB drive, and formatting BOTH drives - what do I do? In fact, I don't think that is a solution, as the 1TB drive was replaced under warranty this year by OWC, and I continue to have the problem.
Any help is appreciated!
Jim

Well, problem not solved. Here's where it gets wierd. I following your suggestions, deleting the plist and restarting, then reslecting the volume "Samsung 2TB" as my Time Machine drive. All is well. Then later in the day, I decided to unmount all of the FW800 drives, and connect JUST the 1TB volume "OWC On-The-Go (SATA)".
The Time Machine pull down on the top of the screen changed from showing the last backup as being to "Samsung 2TB" to showing it as having been to "OWC On-The-Go (SATA)" - as shown in the image below. Note that there was NO Backups.backupdb on the drive at this time - and the prior backup had been to the Samsung 2TB external drive. Since we were about 5 minutes until the next scheduled backup, I promptly plugged the 2TB drive back into the chain, and Time Machine backed up to it, changing the text back to the right drive up top on the screen.
Do I need to reformat the volume? Change the volume name? I've got about 500GB of iMovie data and audio files on there, as well as VMWare machines - it will take a couple of hours to move it to another drive if I need to reformat.
Jim

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Time Machine forgets which drive to use...

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Let's hope a couple things: that you have bootable clones of your drives also; that the backup drive for TimeMachine has over 3x capacity of the data you plan and are storing. I would also switch TM backup drives so you have a 2nd.
Fragmented free space affecting performance happens when the drive is too full which may mean there isn't enough free space for a full backup set.
1.5TB for backing up 500GB, while WD Green 3TB is $140 and WD Black 1.5TB is, about the same price.
I'd be worried about the integrity and directory, and whether you can afford to lose that drive. Defragging is also a very slow operation. the ideal: to just clone a drive, or start over with another drive and wait. cloning TM volumes has not been done or has it? SuperDuper hoped to but I don't think they or Bombich's CCC made it there.
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https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/mac_os_x_v10.6_snow_leopard?view= discussions#/?tagSet=1009
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Defrag Time Machine Back Up Drive??

getwellroad
Level 1 (0 points)
Jul 6, 2011 9:50 AM
i previously posted this question, but I mistakenly clicked my own comment as the correct answer. i think this makes the thread appear to be finished; so, because i'm still not completely sure what to do, i have attempted to copy and paste the discussion here:Sorry.
Just got Prosoft drive genius 3 software, and it's telling me that the external hard drive that i am using for my time machine back up drive needs to be defragmented. is it wise to do this or should i not??
Grant Bennet-AlderWest of Boston, USALevel 7 (27,805 points)
If your backups take a few seconds longer, so what. I say leave it alone.Beige G3, G4/867, G4/dual 1.25 MDD, MacPro'09 w cheap SSD, Mac OS 8.6 or Earlier, and 9.2, 10.5 and Server - LW IIg, LW 4/600, ATalk ImageWriter L
The hatterLevel 8 (42,475 points)
Let's hope a couple things: that you have bootable clones of your drives also; that the backup drive for TimeMachine has over 3x capacity of the data you plan and are storing. I would also switch TM backup drives so you have a 2nd. Fragmented free space affecting performance happens when the drive is too full which may mean there isn't enough free space for a full backup set. 1.5TB for backing up 500GB, while WD Green 3TB is $140 and WD Black 1.5TB is, about the same price. I'd be worried about the integrity and directory, and whether you can afford to lose that drive. Defragging is also a very slow operation. the ideal: to just clone a drive, or start over with another drive and wait. cloning TM volumes has not been done or has it? SuperDuper hoped to but I don't think they or Bombich's CCC made it there. Trouble with highly fragged is when free space gets to 20% normally, 1/3 or so though for TM volumes, and finding where and a chunk of space for the file being written. Does TM use large spare image files of like 2GB? Best would be to ask in the TimeMachine section Snow Leopardhttps://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/mac_os_x_v10.6_snow_leopard?view= discussions#/?tagSet=1009where there are some good FAQ and tutorials, and people that know the ins-and-outs and shortcomings.
getwellroad
my boot drive is my internal hardrive which is a 250 GB drive. The drive i am using for TM is 500GB, but you are saying that is really too small. TM, as i understand it, creates a copy of everything, and then subsequent backups record any changes that were made since the last backup. and what do you mean "bootable clones" and do you mean for my internal hard drive AND each of the 3 external hard drives that i have? i'm using one of the three for backup using TM, and i am storing movie files on the other 2. i work at a church, and we use many short films that we purchase online. i then import that file into iMovie to give my volunteers a consistent second and a half of black before the clip and 4 seconds of black at the end of the clip. This provides smoother transitions, i've found, than trying to use most of the clips in their original form. i then have been filing these away in folders on the other 2 hard drives. Regarding the TM drive. Drive Genius is telling me that "the used space on the volume 02 [that's the name of the drive] is 25% fragmented (59.14% of total space).
btw, Time Machine keeps:hourly backups for the past 24 hoursdaily backups for the past monthweekly backups for all previous monthsand the oldest backups are deleted when your disk becomes full.
Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), LaCie d2 Quadra 500GB external driv

1st) A fragmented drive is not evil. It will not hurt anything. At worse it might slow down reading a file. However, as has been pointed out by others in this thread, who cares as this is a backup device, not a device you are going to be reading a lot.
2nd) The time you spend defragmenting the drive will far exceed the time you will save when writing new data to the drive.
3rd) Defragmentation will just increase your energy consumption, as all the reading/writing needed to move the files around in order to defragment it, will cause the drive to consume more energy than if it was just sitting idle waiting for the next hourly Time Machine backup.
4th) Defragmentation (if done frequently) may shorten the life of your drive. Not mentioned in "3rd" above is that the extra energy used translates into heat, plus you are moving the read/write heads back and forth all of which affect the drives mechanical and electrical components.
NOTE: There are situations where having a defragmented drive is useful, but mostly it has to do with needing to stream media at a high rate of speed, and fragmented files can affect that. However, a backup drive being used for incremental Time Machine backups is not in that category, and most home Mac usage does not need a defragmented file system either.

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That will work just fine, other than the hassle of having to tell Time Machine every time you swap.
Give the drives at least slightly different names (that's for you; Time Machine knows they're different).
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The first backup after a swap may take a bit longer than usual, as there may be more changes to "catch up" with, but otherwise there should be no troubles.

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for emptying time machine backups that i foolishly put in the trash
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i am using a 24 inch iMac
OSX 10.6.8
Message was edited by: summer_laughter

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Ben Goodkind wrote:
Is it possible to use the Time Machine External Drive for storing information aside from back-up files, while using it for Time Machine at the same time? For example, I collect live shows of a certain band. Would it be possible to store the music files on the Time Machine Back-Up drive and still be able to use the drive for Time Machine? Thanks in advance.
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