New Hard Drive installed - Time Machine wants to start over!?

Info: My MacBook Pro is the old version. Plus I have not upgraded to Snow Leopard.
I was running out of hard drive space so I took my MacBook to MacTown where I bought it on Monday night and they put in a 500GB hard drive for me. I asked if it would affect anything such as Time Machine, etc. They said it would not.
When I plugged it in Tue. night (after I picked it up) I got a message saying that it needed about 300GB for the backup and it only had 200GB available (I use a 500GB external drive for my Time Machine backups). I called yesterday and asked if it had to do with the new hard drive. The guy said no, I just had too much stuff on my backup and needed to delete some of it.
Well, last night I messed around with it and a)saw that Time Machine is supposed to delete old backups if it gets too full so this should not be the problem. b)I went into Time Machine and it does not show any old backups. It only has Feb. 1, 2010 as the last one. So, my conclusion: It does not recognize the old backup and wants to start over with my new hard drive.
I called back today and spoke with the guy who did the work. I told him this and he said I should just delete the old backups from my external drive and start over (if I am sure there is nothing I will ever want on it). He said to go to Disk Utility and re-format it.
My question: I am sure I don't need anything from the old backups, but am I not thinking of anything? Is there a chance they didn't copy something over, etc.?
Any advice would be appreciated. I am not impressed with the MacTown people right now.
Thanks,
Peace

Guitar Dude 7 wrote:
Info: My MacBook Pro is the old version. Plus I have not upgraded to Snow Leopard.
I was running out of hard drive space so I took my MacBook to MacTown where I bought it on Monday night and they put in a 500GB hard drive for me. I asked if it would affect anything such as Time Machine, etc. They said it would not.
Tell them about this Apple article: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1338
It does say may, not will, but it always does for me, and there are lots of similar posts in these forums. (This was supposed to be fixed in Snow Leopard, but it still does it.)
Well, last night I messed around with it and a)saw that Time Machine is supposed to delete old backups if it gets too full so this should not be the problem.
That depends. It won't delete the last remaining backup. To do a new full backup requires as much space as the data it's backing-up, plus 20% for workspace, etc., on the TM drive.
I went into Time Machine and it does not show any old backups. It only has Feb. 1, 2010 as the last one. So, my conclusion: It does not recognize the old backup and wants to start over with my new hard drive.
I called back today and spoke with the guy who did the work. I told him this and he said I should just delete the old backups from my external drive and start over (if I am sure there is nothing I will ever want on it). He said to go to Disk Utility and re-format it.
Correct. It is a new drive after all, and Time Machine's main role in life is to back-up anythng that's new or changed.
That's your only choice (although you can just erase it).
My question: I am sure I don't need anything from the old backups, but am I not thinking of anything? Is there a chance they didn't copy something over, etc.?
No, most likely, that's your only option.
Any advice would be appreciated. I am not impressed with the MacTown people right now.
Unfortunately, even the Geniuses at Apple Stores don't know a lot about Time Machine; in some cases, the AppleCare folks aren't a lot better.
You might want to review these:
Time Machine Tutorial
How to back up and restore your files
Time Machine Features
and perhaps browse the Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip* at the top of this forum.

Similar Messages

  • I reinstalled my system on a new hard drive, from time machine. However my old photos seem corrupt within aperture. iphoto seems okay.  Have you heard of this?

    I reinstalled my system on a new hard drive, from time machine. However my old photos seem corrupt within aperture. iphoto seems okay. New photos take a long time to load as well.
    Have you heard of this?
    Thanks

    We need a little more information to be able to help.
    However my old photos seem corrupt within aperture.
    What kind of corruption? And when do you see it? All your images, or only some? Are the images distorted, discolored, or not displayed at all?
    Are you shooting in raw? Is your library referenced or managed? Is your library on your system volume or on an external harddrive?
    And it would help to know your MacOS version and Aperture version too.
    Regards
    Léonie

  • How do i install a new hard drive using time machine

    Hi there
    I have purchased a new 1TB hard drive for my Mac book pro (late 2008) model. I have time machine installaed on a seperate hard drive connected with an airport base station. I do not have the orginal snow leapoard/mountain lion OS CD or DVD. Can someone please tell me the exact steps to install the new hard drive .
    Thanks

    You haven't inserted your new hard drive yet?.
    There's two ways
    1. install yourself
    2. or pay someone to install it for you.
    If you want to do it yourself go to google and type in "install new hard drive for macbook pro". sometimes it makes a difference what model your macbook which is why i won't provide you a link just in case its the wrong one.
    Its very easy.
    1. remove all screws and the lid.
    2. remove screws from the black bracket which is holding your hard drive in place.
    3. unplug your hard drive.
    4. VERY IMPORTANT (A MISTAKE I MADE). make sure that you remove the external screws from your original hard drive as these screws are the one thing that hold and stabilise your hard drive and stop movement from happening.
    5. insert these external screws to your new hard drive (there are four screws)
    6. insert and plug your new hard drive.
    7. screw the black bracket in firmly
    8. attach lid and insert all screws firmly.

  • Help Restoring New Hard Drive from Time Machine

    To replace a failing Macintosh HD, I created an OS X Mountain Lion boot disk on a flash drive, put my new hard drive in a USB external dock, booted to the flash drive, partitioned and formatted the new drive (selecting GUID partition), and have tried and failed three times to restore from Time Machine, which is on a Firewire-connected drive. The error I get is that it's unable to create a restore disk.
    I could reformat the new drive and try again, but is there something else I'm missing? For example, should I have left the new drive in the external dock, or should I move it to bay 1 and then try to restore, considering that latency is a possible issue or that Time Machine won't restore to a USB drive?

    Why don't you install ML on it and then see?
    Better yet use any of the 4 internal drive bays instead of USB - slow and terrrible place!
    It does not matter where or what drive bay.
    Unable to unmount drive.
    CLONE your system - a couple times, pure Apple Mac OS once you have one and later for working copy and one before you install or apply updates or programs or otehr changes.
    CCC carbon copy cloner - will create recovery partition when you clone a system.
    I assume your flash drive works, not everyone is successful first shot.
    I prefer a clean install to start with. Esp as you say your system was failing I don't like relying on the Time Machine for everything.

  • Help restore new hard drive via time machine back up in time capsule

    I have followed Pondini's How Do I Restore My Entire System from a backup on Time Capsule.  I get all the way to section G with No Problem.  I get to section H and my new Hard Drive does not appear in the Select a Destination box.  The icon indicating the system is calculating the size of the volume keeps moving.  Finally it stops searching/calculating and just offers the button "go back".  For some reason it doesnt recognize my new HD.  I open Disk Utility and perform a check and the hard drive appears to be working fine.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

    Are you sure you formatted the new drive properly, per section (c) there?
    If that's not right, you can't install OSX on it.

  • HT3275 Can I do a custom restore to a new hard drive using time machine selecting only what I want to migrate?

    My hard drive failed and I had to replace it. I want to restore from time machine but there are some applications and folders I want to exclude from the back up. Is this possible?

    Yes. Partition and format the new drive, then install Mountain Lion from scratch. When finished you can restore what you want, manually, from your Time Machine backup.
    Install or Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion from Scratch
    Be sure you backup your files to an external drive or second internal drive because the following procedure will remove everything from the hard drive.
    Boot to the Recovery HD:
    Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
    Erase the hard drive:
      1. Select Disk Utility from the main menu and click on the Continue button.
      2. After DU loads select your startup volume (usually Macintosh HD) from the
          left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
      3. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Optionally, click on
            the Security button and set the Zero Data option to one-pass. Click on
          the Erase button and wait until the process has completed.
      4. Quit DU and return to the main menu.
    Reinstall Lion: Select Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion and click on the Install button.
    Note: You will need an active Internet connection. I suggest using Ethernet if possible
                because it is three times faster than wireless.

  • Problems with installing new hard drive using time machine

    Hi,
    I have a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 15" Macbook Pro (unibody) with 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 and a 250 GB Sata HD running OS 10.6.7.
    It works like a dream.
    However, i bought a new 1 TB HD (WD Scorpio Blue) since a) 250 GB is not enough for me right now b) warranty has expired, so new risk there and c) i read that installing it would be very easy.
    I'll try so explain what i did, see if anyone finds what could be wrong...
    I had some minor problem in the beginning (i didn't use the install disk of the macbook pro at first, because it was at the office, so i used the install disk of my old Alu iMac), but using the right disk, i opened "Restore Disk from Backup", selected the Time Machine disk, and waited for the target drive to appear. It didn't...
    Finally i figured, maybe he doesn't find it because it hasn't been formatted yet (although it says on the HD that the Scorpio Blue is ready to use as is). So i openen disk utility from the utility folder and formatted the disk as "OS Journaled". As expected (?) the disk appeared as a target Restore Disk. I selected it and "restore" started. It took some hours and finally i receive a message: restore complete (or something like that). But then... after the restart i say the apple logo (as always) followed by the 'i don't know how you call it'-screen: a grey screen coming down like a curtain that says something like: you have to hold down the power button and then press it again tot restart (in a dozen or so languages including mandarin or japanese...). Off course i tried to restart several times, always with the same result.
    I switched back to my old drive and it still works like a dream ;-)
    So now i'm typing this message, can someone point out to me what could be the problem?
    Some more information/possible causes:
    - i run snow leopard, but the install disk is leopard. Maybe i should have used the install disk of the Snow Leopard i bought?
    - the time machine backup backs up EVERYTHING including an external firewire disk (on the same disk). Maybe that could be a problem? I don't know if the backup disk will restore the content of my external disk to my new internal HD or not...
    Thanks for helping me out...
    Best regards,
    Tom

    Hold on... it seems like i missed the obvious answer: using snow leopard to re-install a snow leopard back up. I'll try that one first and if it doesn't work i'll come back to this discussion...

  • Restoring on a new hard drive with time machine between leopard/snow leopard

    I am about to install a new larger hard drive on my late 2007 MacBook (Going from a full 120GB to a 500GB). My MacBook came with Leopard and I upgraded to Snow Leopard when it came out. I have the original Leopard install disks and the upgrade disk from Snow Leopard. I currently have an external HD connected to my airport extreme and Time Machine is on scheduled backup to this drive over the WiFi.
    From what I've read it looks like I cannot use the Leopard startup disk to restore my Snow Leopard created Time Machine backup (I've read it becomes unbootable...). I've read about cloning, which feels a little over my head, so I wondered - Can I install Leopard from the original disk, then upgrade to Snow Leopard with the upgrade disk I have, then restore my Time Machine after that? I assume it would be fastest to restore the Time Machine backup if I have the external connected directly to the USB of the MacBook rather than over the WiFi - yes?
    If I can tack on a slight hardware question too - is it worth upgrading from 2 to 4GB of RAM while I'm going to be inside my computer?
    Thanks!!!

    Partition the drive in GUID format with one Mac OS X data partition.

  • New hard drive and time machine recovery

    I am planning to install a new ram and hard drive on my macbook in few days. I have been backing up the system through time machine for about a year.
    My question is once I install the new hardware how do I install everything through the time machine??? Does time machine back up software as well? Would I need recovery DVDs? Would I need product keys and so on? or is it as easy as simply after installation of the hardware, turn on the computer with the time machine connected and it'll do everything and my computer would be back to what it was previously?

    level i wrote:
    I am planning to install a new ram and hard drive on my macbook in few days. I have been backing up the system through time machine for about a year.
    My question is once I install the new hardware how do I install everything through the time machine???
    see this link for instructions
    http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1964018#14
    Does time machine back up software as well?
    it backs up the whole drive with everything on it which includes all software.

  • Restoring image to a new hard drive from time machine

    My  hard drive failed and I have installed a replacement. I have followed all the prompts to back up from a recent file on my time machine. Once I select the back up, a screen comes up that says "Select a Destination" in the window, it says "searching for disks..." and never changes. If I go into the disk utility, the new drive shows up just fine. Any ideas?

    Partition the drive in GUID format with one Mac OS X data partition.

  • Can't restore new hard drive from time machine back up

    Looking for some help on this one....
    Briefly: iMac 24" aluminium early 2008 (model 2134) trying to upgrade the original 320 gb HDD. So I bought a WD Caviar Black 64 mb, 6gb/s 1Tb drive, intalled it pretty smoothly and then using an install disc restored it from a time machine back up. That went fine then I could not restart the mac (kernel panic). So i trouble shooted with an extended hardware test, disk repair and everything seemed fine. I reinstalled my old HDD again and worked perfectly so I figured my iMac doesn't like this Caviar (due to sata3 perhaps??) so I went and bought a Seagate barracuda sata2 1 TB 7200 rpm and repated the whole process. Again everything went super smooth until the restoring process ended and the iMac was restarted. Kernel panic again. Already tried PRAM, option key. Booting from the CD or my old drive is not a problem at all but from the newly installed drive (x2) ... Impossible
    Any thoughts ???
    Thanks

    Booting from the CD or my old drive is not a problem at all but from the newly installed drive (x2) ... Impossible
    Disconnect all peripherals from your computer except for the keyboard and mouse. Double check to make sure that you installed the hard drive correctly - http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Browse/iMac#SectioniMac_Num20
    Select your imac then select hard drive replacement, and there are the instructions.
    Video instructions - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzuBW3mu7LI and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVzYXgUhygI

  • New hard drive and time machine not backing up

    I recently replaced my MacBook Pro's hard drive with a larger HD.  After replacing HD and making sure all my data is operating correctly, I noticed my Time Machine is not backing up.  I was hoping it would continue to backup daily as soon as I was back on my home network but no such luck.  Does anyone know how to re-establish my conncection and hopefully start where I left off with daily backups?  Thx

    Check Pondini's Time Machine Troubleshooting.
    B6 seems to be the topic you are looking for.

  • Need advice on new hard drive for Time Machine, and have Firewire questions

    I have an Intel iMac 2.66GHz with 500GB internal drive. I am going to buy an OWC 1TB drive to use for Time Machine.
    I also have an older 160GB external drive with Firewire 400. I'd like to continue using it for extra storage, and would like both the iMac's internal drive and the 160GB external drive to be backed up to the new drive.
    OWC's 1TB drive is available with Firewire 400 & USB 2. For an additional $30, it will also have Firewire 800. If I get the Firewire 800 drive and daisy-chain the iMac > new 1TB drive > old 160GB drive, will the iMac to 1TB drive run at 800, or will the 160GB drive's limitation of Firewire 400 pull the speed of the whole connection down to 400? (If the latter is true, then it would be a waste of money to get Firewire 800.)
    Also, will it make much difference whether I use Firewire 800 or 400 for a drive dedicated to Time Machine?
    Finally, the 1TB drive with a 32MB cache costs $20 more than one with a 16MB cache. Is a 32MB cache worth the extra expense for using with Time Machine?
    Thanks!
    Message was edited by: Patrick Houlihan

    Patrick Houlihan wrote:
    If I get the Firewire 800 drive and daisy-chain the iMac > new 1TB drive > old 160GB drive, will the iMac to 1TB drive run at 800, or will the 160GB drive's limitation of Firewire 400 pull the speed of the whole connection down to 400? (If the latter is true, then it would be a waste of money to get Firewire 800.)
    I believe it will operate the entire bus at the slowest speed, but can't say for sure.
    Finally, the 1TB drive with a 32MB cache costs $20 more than one with a 16MB cache. Is a 32MB cache worth the extra expense for using with Time Machine?
    I went with the cheaper, smaller cache OWC drives for my backups on the theory that if caches speed repeated access of the same data, and a backup is always a single-pass stream of non-repeating data, then with a backup the data that goes in the cache doesn't need to be fetched again and therefore the cache isn't much help for backups. I'd love to hear if that's true.
    I didn't answer the one about FireWire 800 for Time Machine because my Time Machine backups are over the network to Time Capsule. However, having a faster Time Machine drive interface should be faster. FireWire 800 certainly speeds things up for non-Time Machine backup software like SuperDuper which I also use.

  • AFP error for new hard drive for time machine The network backup disk does not support the required AFP features.

    Purchased Seagate network drive, ethernet attached to wireless router, set up went well but attempts at backup with Time Machine failed. "Do I need to erase disk and reformat or is this error message "The network backup disk does not support the required AFP features" indicating some other error?

    That means the NAS drive's OS isn't compatible with the version of OSX you're running.   See if the maker has an update.
    See #C16 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

  • New hard drive - odd Time Machine behavior

    Hi,
    I just had my failing HD replaced in my Macbook Pro 17" - The tech. that did it restored from the last good Time Machinr backup to the new HD, and everyrhing seems to work fine. So I then tried to do a full backup of the new HD to a brand new external HD. The first time it stopped about half way through, and yet when I enter Time Machine on the Mac, all the files seem to be there.  Then I added a few new photo files, and am now doing another Time Machine backup. But it says it's now backing up 102.95 Gigs (total on HD is 292.07 Gigs). The Time Machine preference pane doesn't seem to recognize the earlier backup (see screenshot) and yet when I enter Time Machine, it's apparently all there. How can I tell if it's working correctly?
    Thanks,
    Richard

    Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
    ☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
    ☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
    ☞ If you’re running Mac OS X 10.7 or later, open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the page that opens.
    Select "system.log" from the file list. Enter "backupd" (without the quotes) in the String Matching text field. Post the messages from the last backup, beginning with "Starting standard backup."
    Post the log text, please, not a screenshot. If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Do not post many repetitions of the same message.
    Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — edit that out, too, but don’t remove the context.

Maybe you are looking for