Moving Time Machine: New Hard Drive

I have been using Time Machine on my 500GB USB 2.0 WD My Book for about a month now. I recently purchased a 1TB FW 800 WD My Book and would like to transfer my existing Time Machine backup data from the 500GB to the 1TB drive. There are a few things I am unsure of:
1. How can I make the 1TB drive my Time Machine backup and still have all of the old backups from the 500GB drive?
2. Since my Mac's internal drive is only 600GB, I'd like to allocate only that much space for the Time Machine backups. Am I able to partition the drive and use the other 400GB as storage that's accessible on both Macs and Windows machines?
Thank you to anyone who is willing to help me out.

Adam Fratus wrote:
I have been using Time Machine on my 500GB USB 2.0 WD My Book for about a month now. I recently purchased a 1TB FW 800 WD My Book and would like to transfer my existing Time Machine backup data from the 500GB to the 1TB drive. There are a few things I am unsure of:
1. How can I make the 1TB drive my Time Machine backup and still have all of the old backups from the 500GB drive?
You can copy them, if you want. Copy the entire Backups.backupdb file via the Finder (Snow Leopard only; not Leopard), or use the Restore tab of Disk Utility as in item #18 of the
Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip.*
2. Since my Mac's internal drive is only 600GB, I'd like to allocate only that much space for the Time Machine backups. Am I able to partition the drive and use the other 400GB as storage that's accessible on both Macs and Windows machines?
That's probably not a good idea. What's important is not the total size of your internal HD, but the amount of data that's on it (and will be on it in the foreseeable future). TM normally needs 2-3 times that much space (see item#1 of the FAQ Tip).
Make your TM partition first, so it's easier to expand it later on, if need be. Then format the second partition as +FAT 32,+ so both Windoze and OSX can use it. See item 5 in the FAQ Tip for partitioning instructions.

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Time Machine: New Hard Drive Unable to be "formatted"?

Dear community,
I apologize for this post, I searched a little but aside from the current TM bug, I had a hard time finding an answer to this question. I'm also re-installing on my other laptop so I am unable to reproduce this SNAFU.
I recently ungraded my hard drive on my mid-2008 unibody Macbook, now running 10.8.4 (first of the unibodies!). I finally outgrew my 160 gig hard drive and bought a 500 gig WD Caviar Black. I created a TM restore on my old backup, and installed the new hard drive into my mac and restored from my back up (2 days ago). This isn't like the current bug that's going on at this time, I was able to see and restore from the most recent TM point.
Today, I had to force a close secondary to a run away process (Sophos) that was overheating and taking up my processes. I was unable to force quit, so I did a hard reset. At this point, I got the gray screen of death and was unable to progress past the Apple Logo. Safe booting proved that there wasn't any problem mounting the disk and everything would point to some sort of corrupt process.
When I got home from work, I used disk utility repaired permissions, but was unable to progress past the Apple Logo. I used a NEW back up disk last night to back up my TM to make a restore point, and I was going to just restore the whole computer from that. Unfortunately, I had an error when I attempted to restore from the TM backup.
Essentially, it was able to initiate the back up, but within the first 15 seconds it would stop and say something similar to "...Unable to restore from Time Machine back up, the new hard drive is unable to mount/install restore software/image. Please restart to attempt again..." Apparently, it's rare to have this problem, my googling did not find many recent occurances.
Thus my night has been this:
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-- Repaired permissions and verified disk (both checked out), the first time the permissions were changed (--r--x--w to something)
-- Reformatted the disk w/ zoroes x1
-- Reattempt to reinstall from TM (with the same error)
I wish I grabbed screens, but I was a bit frustrated. Right now, I am re-installing ML from the web and then attempting to use the Migration Assistant to restore from these Time Machine back ups. I had around 15 gigs of pictures moved onto the new machine last night (hence the back up last night). So, I'm pretty good with terminal, so I'm not going to be shy about poking around.
Any suggestions? Thoughts? I am much obliged for your input.

So, right after I try to restore I get this message,
"An error occurred while adding a recovery system to the destination disk. Restart your computer and then try restoring again."
This is very vague.

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Choose Computer from the Finder's Go menu and double-click it. If needed, use the Connect to Server command to log into it.
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Transferring data from Time Machine external hard drive to band new mac

My husband bought me a brand new Mac but then powered it up to play with it and bypassed the magic transfer option at the very beginning which would have allowed me to transfer my backed up info from my old mac to this new one.
Is there a process that I need to go through now to make sure this information transfers correctly or do I just plug in my external hard drive and let it do its thing.
My worry is that I do something wrong and Time Machine doesn't know that I need to transfer to a new mac, it sincs with the new mac and the old data gets somehow erased.
Paranoid? Oh yes!
Thanks for any help....

Time Machine transfers of backed up info to any Mac are not automatic, nor does any backed up info get erased from the Time Machine backup when you do a transfer. You have two options for copying Time Machine backup files to the new Mac:
1. Use Migration Assistant (found in Applications/Utilities) to migrate (copy) items to the new Mac. Select "From a Time Machine backup or other disk" as the migration method, then select the Time Machine backup of the old Mac, then select the items you want to transfer. You can select some or all of the user accounts on the old Mac, Applications (all or none), Settings files (Time Zone, Machine, and/or Network), & "Other" files & folders (which are any other root level files & folders not included in the above).
If you have already set up your network, time zone, etc. settings while playing with the new Mac then there is no particular need to migrate the old ones. If you migrate Applications, Migration Assistant will not replace newer versions with older ones, but it may transfer some old apps that don't work with Snow Leopard. This won't do any harm, but you may want to delete the incompatible apps as you discover them to save space on the new hard drive.
If you have created a new user account on the new Mac with the same name as some account on the old Mac, you will have to either give the old account a new name for the transfer or replace the new account with the old one, which will erase any user files you have created in the new account. Thus, you should save any such files to a backup if you want to keep them.
2. Use Time Machine itself to restore selected files or folders from the Time Machine backup of the old Mac to the new one. Open Time Machine from the Dock, choosing "Browse Other Time Machine Disks…" from the popup options. Again, choose the Time Machine backup of the old Mac, & then select whatever dated backup you want to restore items from.
All this is harder to explain than to do in actual practice -- for the first method you get on-screen guidance for each step & for the second the interface is pretty intuitive.

Have found multiple iTunes Library.xml files. Moved Library to new Hard Drive and it needs to be completely rebuilt?

Hello. I have a Mac Mini operating Mac OS X 10.7.2. I recently had to move my iTunes Library to a new hard drive. I followed the directions on how to move the library and refind everything yet when I do so what comes up is a mere skeleton of what I had. I have had to hunt down my purchased Apps, Music and Movies and re-add them to the library. I also noticed in doing this I have multiple iTunes Library.xml files ... shouldn't there only be one? If so how do I clean this up without doing any accidental damage (i.e. how do I find the one that is being used and delete the rest?)? If I delete the others is there any risk of losing purchased content? Lastly syncing my iPads has become a nightmare as I get the "This iPad is currently synced to another iTunes library" message. Obviously something

It's hard for me to picture the exact situation. It sounds like you still have your library file on the internal but some files on the external, and maybe some on the internal, some of which are in the library and others not... By re-adding things after consolidating it may have made things into a hodge-podge. Yes, that article you referenced says: "iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder"with Media Folder being the emphasis. You probably should have just moved your whole iTunes folder. Still, moving the media folder as instructed should not have messed up the library. Did you make the mistake of starting up iTunes before the external drive had mounted fully and it then told you it couldn't find many files? How you proceed to sort it out will depend upon how much time you want to spend and how important things such as ratings and playcount are to you. I have not actually used the consolidate feature across different drives myself (and don't feel inclined to do so here to test ).
If you are in the USA you can download some previous purhcases with iCloud, but not all.
Here's a bit on what an iTunes folder should look like:
What are the iTunes library files? - [http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1660]
More on iTunes library files and what they do - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes#Media_management]
Library files with graphic and explanation of different iTunes versions - http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=13169517
Once you get iTunes working off the external drive it should just put new media to the external when you add it.
I have almost no experience with synching (I synched my neice's iPod, once, about 4 years ago).

ITunes moved to a new hard drive, now acting like a newly installed program

I just moved my ITunes to an external hard drive and followed all the directions to do so (did a google search and it lead me to this site where I followed the instructions outlined). Now ITunes won't work, it won't access any music whatsoever. In fact when I open ITunes it's appearance is that of the freshly installed program and no songs at all come up under music
I decided I had to have the space because I only have an 80 GB drive (C) and my music files occupy 52 GB of that (ITunes accounts for 2/3 of that 52GB total for some strange reason)
The new hard drive (F) is an HP Simple Save and that program backed up all my C drive information (including ITunes).
Then I followed the instructions I found on this site. I went in, identified the new folder, consolidated the files and nothing. When I restarted ITunes I got the screen above
So I tried putting ITunes back on the C drive and reset ITunes using the reset button under "Edit, Preferences, Advanced" and that still doesn't work. Not to mention I now have ITunes buried under a mountain of sub folders
I am at my wits end with ITunes. My first IPod was a gift (my seond I had to buy after washing my first) but ITunes has been nothing but trouble the whole time and now this!!!!!!!
Can someone please help me????????????? I like my IPod, I on't want to have to get rid of it and buy an MP3 player that works with Windows

My Library files are still on the C drive as the instructions said to leave them there
While it is implied that I can move ITunes music files off my C drive to make more space
Quote: "If your hard drive is nearly full after loading all your music and other media into iTunes, or if you just want to move all those music and media files to another hard drive on your system, here's a way to make the move while retaining all your playlists, ratings, and play history."
In fact I now see that ITunes Help seems to suggest something different. I got here by pressing the question mark while in the pop up box for "Edit, Preferences, Advanced"
Quote:
"By default, songs and other files you import into iTunes are placed here:
My Documents/My Music/iTunes/iTunes Media
Hide
To change the default location of imported files:
Choose Edit > Preferences, and click Advanced.
Click Change and select a new location for your files.
From now on, new songs and other items you import are stored in the new location. Songs you’ve already imported stay in their current location. (emphasis mine)
To restore the iTunes Media folder as the default storage location, click Reset (in the Advanced pane of iTunes preferences)."

A newb moving to a new hard drive.

So, I'm out of the country on holiday with my MacBook. I'm going back to the UK for New Years where I'll have a new MacBook Pro waiting for me at my parents (Woohoo, Christmas!).
Before going back home, my wife wants to give the MacBook to her Mum. There's going to be a transitional period with no Mac.
Is it possible to buy an external hard drive and completely and utterly copy the entire contents [OS, all data, etc] over, so that I can take the contents of the MB back home to the MBPro?
I believe my wife brought the OS installation discs with her (the benefits of having a wife) so if necessary I can install OS X onto the new hard drive before copying data.
So how do I go about doing this? You probably didn't need the backstory. But it's a nice read, right?
Thank you for your help.
Joe.

JofishSamuel wrote:
Hello! Thank you very much for taking the time to read and reply.
I think you may have misunderstood me. There's no new Macintosh involved just yet. I simply have a MacBook with an internal HD that contains everything I want and a blank external HD that I want to contain everything currently on my MacBook.
The reason why I was concerned about the different OS is because I thought you had to run Disk Utility from the installation discs to run Restore
To do a full system restore +*from Time Machine backups+* you must start up from an Install disc. But you're not going to do that, so it's not a problem.
Also, I don't want to back anything up.
Most folks would say making a complete copy of your internal HD is backing-up. There are various kinds of backups, one being a "bootable clone."
So, anyway. I took a few steps of my own anyway. Please read through and tell me if this sounds good to you.
I inserted my External and reformatted it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I then used Restore with the source being my 'Macintosh HD' and the external the destination. I ticked 'Erase Destination'.
I then (well I think anyway as the name's were the same)
Yes, the Restore tab copies the name as well. That's easily changed -- right-click it in a Finder sidebar.
And you've made what most folks call a "bootable clone" type of backup.
1) S.M.A.R.T Status is not supported, unlike the internal HD.
Correct.
2) The Partition Map Scheme is different. Internal being 'GUID partition table', external being 'master boot record'
Oops, that may be a problem. It may start, but you can't update it with Software Update, etc.
You really should do it over. Start up normally, from the internal HD, and erase and reformat the external HD, per #1 in [Formatting, Partitioning, Verifying, and Repairing Disks|http://web.me.com/pondini/AppleTips/DU.html]. Then do the Restore again.
This is all just ridiculously confusing!
A lot of that is because the disk was set up for Windoze (the Master Boot Record partition map scheme).
That disk will start the Mac it was made from, but it will not start your new Mac. To get your stuff onto the new Mac, when you first start it up, after the Welcome video, select "From another volume on this Mac" and connect the drive to it. See [Setting up a new Mac from an old one or its backups|http://web.me.com/pondini/AppleTips/Setup.html] for details.

Problems restoring files with Time Machine after hard drive failure

Hello everyone,
I had a Mavericks (10.9.5) installation on my Mac Mini when my hard drive suddenly "died". I therefore replaced the hard drive with a new one and started the recovery mode using the cmd + R keyboard shortcut during booting. I then partitioned and formated the new hard drive and afterwards selectd "Restore from Time Machine Backup" (see the screenshot on the following page: https://www.apple.com/osx/recovery/). To my surprise, the following error message was displayed: "An error occurred while adding a recovery system to the destination disk". After some research, I discovered that this problem is probably caused by a Mountain Lion installation bug (http://macdailynews.com/2013/02/28/new-macs-suffering-from-os-x-mountain-lion-in stallation-bug/). This leads to my first question:
1) Why does the recovery mode start the Mountain Lion (10.8.5) installer and not the Mavericks (10.9.5) installer?
Anyway, since this problem left me no alternative, I selected "Reinstall OS X" instead, which downloaded Mountain Lion from the Internet. After the installation was complete, I used Migration Assistant to recover my two accounts, their apps and data. However, after the process was completed, I discovered that some files were missing in a folder that I was using before the hard drive "died". This leads to my second question:
2) Why are some files missing from that folder?
Anyway, I though I could quickly recover these lost files by entering Time Machine. I did that and selected the respective folder. However, having that folder or any other folder selected, Time Machine doesn't display any previous back-ups on its timeline although the latter goes back as far as 26 August 2013.
3) Why doesn't Time Machine display older versions of that folder on its timeline?
I will greatly appreciate any help!

Try E2/4 in the 1st linked article.
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems
James Pond (Pondini) died last year unfortunately.

Time Machine after hard drive crash

Recently, my MacBook's hard drive crashed. Fortunately, I had most of my data backed up via Time Machine. So, once Apple installed a new hard drive, I "restored all" with Time Machine. Now when I launch Time Machine, my archive only goes back a few days, to when I initially "restored all" -- before, my archives went back to November. Where did all of my backups go? How can I get them to show up in Time Machine?

when TM does the first backup after a full system restore it sometimes does a complete (or nearly complete) backup. This happened to me once. this creates a big space demand to accommodate that backup and if there is not enough space TM will start deleting old backups to create space. To check this open TM drive in finder, go to Backups.backupdb->computer-name folder. all available backups will be listed there chronologically. how far back does it go?

Moved library to new hard drive, iPod no longer communicates

Ok, I am computer savy but know next to nothing about iTunes as I don't use it, but my wife does use it. However, my wife is not computer savy.
My wife's old hard drive started dying (on a Dell laptop), so we bought a new one and moved all her files over. However, she now has 2 problems:
(1) She cannot use any of the old music files. I read around online, and I have discovered that we need to consolidate the old files from the old HD into a flash drive using the iTunes consolidate library function. Then they can be imported to the new library on the new computer. This is doable as the old drive is not yet completely dead.
(2) However, she has since purchased/downloaded new songs out of the iTunes store onto the new HD, and thus I need to keep the new HD's library intact or we'll lose the files. *Now the big problem: her iPod will not connect to the new iTunes library.* I assume this is because iPods sync with a particular library, not a particular computer, and the library of the old computer was not properly transferred. Thus there is a new library, that contains songs we don't want to lose, but we can't connect the iPod.
Please help! How do we transfer the old "library" settings that allow the iPod to be synced without completely deleting the existing library on the new hard drive?
Thanks.
OS is Windows 7 and new HD's iTunes version is 10.0.0.68.
Message was edited by: bagman27

RS
How did you go about this move?
The correct way to do it is
1. Quit iPhoto
2. Copy the iPhoto Library as an entity from your Pictures Folder to the External Disk.
3. Hold down the option (or alt) key while launching iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library' and navigate to the new location. From that point on this will be the default location of your library.
4. Test the library and when you're sure all is well, trash the one on your internal HD to free up space.
If you still have the original library it might be worth trying again.
Regards
TD

Moved music to new hard drive now itunes can't find songs !

This is what I did. My old hard drive was getting full so I bought an additional hard drive and installed it. I then selected all the music in the itunes music folder, copied it, then pasted it into a new folder on the new hard drive. I changed the settings in itunes to direct to the new hard drive. All the music i put in there now has exclamation points next to it and can't access the music? Help. I'm desperate....

Different problem. - probably same answer. Yesterday I started iTunes and I had exclamation points on about 20 of my tunes. I re-linked them all manually. I am new to iTunes but I believe I am beginning to understand that unless all the sources are in one library they 'may' get unlinked from time to time. I am going to assume that all of your tunes are linked to a source that no longer exists. So they are all now unlinked.
What I would like to know is how to restore those links. I am going to make another assumtion. Since I believe that iTunes loaded most of them when I first started using iTunes, there is a way to force it to do that again. I have no problem with putting all of my tunes in one library. I know that others have posted the desire to store and link tunes in multiple libraries, and there is a Consoldiate Option that says it will consolidate all of your tunes into one libary. It doesn't work. So how do you force iTunes to relink your files, in or out of the same library?

Moved library to new hard drive, now nothing shows in iTunes

I moved my library to a new internal hard drive, but the music does not show when I start up iTunes. I followed the instructions from the Apple website, so I don't know what to do. I can see the files on the new hard drive, so I know they are still around. I'm afraid to sync as I may lose everything. What do I do?
VAIO PCV-RZ24G Windows XP

First - re-read all the instructions and figure out where you might have dropped a step. Below are three similar sites that explain the same process. One may help you diagnose what went wrong.
My guess is that you moved or corrupted your Library database file in the process. But without more information, I am just taking a shot in the dark.
See these links for some step-by-step info:
iLounge: Moving your iTunes Library to a New Hard Drive
MacMuse: iTfW: Move iTunes music/Library to new drive
iTunes: Moving your iTunes Music folder

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

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See Pondini's TM FAQs, for starters.

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