Time machine backup to large to migrate to MBP

Hi everyone,
I really hope someone can help me with this problem.
A while ago I took a time machine backup of my old macbook pro, which I no longer have. Now I want to use migrate assistant to get all my old files, applications, settings etc. onto another macbook pro. The problem is that the backup on the external hard drive is 339 GB, but the hard drive on the "new" macbook pro is only 320 GB. Is there any way for me to retrieve my files from the time machine backup without getting another computer with a larger hard drive? I don´t mind losing 20-30 GB of my old files, as long as I can get most of them back.
Ingibjörg Högna

With a new MBP you want to use Migration Assistant instead of TM Restore, that should eliminate a few GB, like the OS, which may not work on the newer one anyway.
If you are restoring a backup made by one Mac to a completely different Mac
Important: If the backup you are about to restore is from a completely different Mac, use theMigration Assistant to transfer data from the backup, as described in the next section.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4413

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Time Machine backup too large for backup disk

My Mac hard drive is 750GB (25GB free).
My LaCie external dedicated backup hard drive is 1TB (342GB free).
I am now getting the error "Time Machine couldn't complete the backup" "This backup is too large for the backup disk"
I thought once my initial backup of 750GB happened, it would be incremental backups from then on (with old changes betting deleted as space was needed for new changes).
Is this not the case? Do I need a much larger backup drive or something?
Thanks much for any help.

It's true but Time Machine has also to make complete backups again in case you want to restore your Mac with a more recent Time Machine backup.
Clearly the external drive you have doesn't have enough storage to back up your Mac. As you have about 725 GB of used space, I recommend you to get at least a 3 or 4 TB external drive to make backups, and even with this, don't think you will have more than four backups. Another thing you can do is to remove folders from the backup in System Preferences > Time Machine > Options

Possible to restore iTunes safely to a new mac (from time machine backup) without using setup/migration assistant?

Hello all,
I have just acquired a new MacBook which I want to set up completely fresh. The only data I really need to restore/copy to it, besides a few document folders, is the iTunes library from my existing iMac. The iTunes library has been backed up using time machine on the iMac (using a portable drive). I’ve heard it might be possible for me to plug the time machine backup into the new MacBook and then option-click the time machine icon in order to 'browse other backup disks' and then restore iTunes. Would this work and would all my devices still sync with iTunes? I’m just a bit nervous because apple has migration assistant and setup assistant for doing this sort of thing - I just really don’t want to use them because the only thing I want on my new MacBook from the whole of the time machine backup is literally the iTunes library. I don’t want to start restoring user accounts which you must do with the assistants.
Thank you.

Thank you ever so much for the replies. Just one thing: the link you provided seems to discuss restoring individual items on the computer for which a backup has been made. On my macbook I can't click "enter time machine" which I'm guessing is because the time machine backup is for my old iMac (hence my comment about control clicking the menu bar).

Time machine backup too large

i had a weird quirky thing happen to my computer. It crashed and when I restarted, all my login items and programs were asking me for my licenses and registration nos. as if i had just installed them. Plus all their settings went back to default. Recovering all my registration information would have taken an act of god, as my appshelf data was corrupted too. After many different recovery attempts, I scrapped it all, did one final Time Machine backup, and restored my computer from a date I knew was working (about 3 weeks earlier), using the system disk. My Time Machie backups went back nearly a year. When I was up and running, I then went in to Time Macine and brought over piecemeal new files that had been added since three weeks ago.
A couple days later, I attempted to get something from an old Time Machine backup, but now the bakups did not extend back as far, but they only went to the date I restored from 3 weeks earlier. I thought that was weird, but continued on. Later, it was only going back a couple days. Having a "working system" I thought nothing of it..but now it is telling me July 25 is the oldet backup, taking up 230.84 GB of 499.76, and any successive backup fails. Instead of incrementally backing up, Time Machie is now attemptng to do a full bnackup, requiring 250 GB, but only 230 are available. Does asnyone know it's not just backing up the changes, but attempting to backup the whole thing??

Sometimes, this error is legitimate. The user may not realize that they need to exclude additional hard disks that TM may be seeing. This is done in the “Options…” window of the Time Machine Preferences.
Nevertheless, many times this error just doesn’t make sense, stating that not enough free space exists for a backup that is clearly smaller. (“The backup requires 45.9 GB but only 182.6 GB are available”)
The answer and fix may have been discovered by a poster in the macosxhints forums: (http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-84284.html)
Essentially, while Time Machine DOES delete old backups from the sparsebundle, it DOES NOT free up the space occupied by those old backups. Eventually, "all previous backups were deleted and no space was gained. . . . What appears to be going on here is that the sparsebundle isn't self-shrinking - unused bands aren't being automagically discarded."
The solution is to compact the TM backup sparsebundle in Terminal using:
hdiutil compact yoursparsebundlefilename.
He concludes, "I gained 30+gb of space on the backup volume by compacting that sparsebundle. And now TM runs just fine, since it has plenty of space."
Obviously, this is a bug in TM. It does not appear to effect everyone, and only seems to appear under certain curcumstances.
Let us know if this works for you.

Why is my time machine backup to large to install from?

I'm trying to setup my new MacBook from a time machine backup of my old IMac. My backup file is 250gb and there is over 400gb of space on the hard drive but it keeps coming up with a message saying there is not enough space to do the install.
I've had to leave my IMac at home interstate and need my iBook setup the same - unfortunately doing another backup with only the essential files and configurations is not an option. The situation seems strange though - is there another way?

lplex wrote:
I need help with TM, too, as it tries to do a full backup after I restored my Macintosh HD from TM as suggested by Disk Utility.
If you're on Snow Leopard or Lion, and did a full system restore by starting from the Recovery HD (Lion) or your Install disc (Snow Leopard), Time Machine should have figured it out and done an incremental backup.
If it didn't, and you're on Lion, and your backups are on a local disk (ie, not on a network), you may be able to tell TM to "associate" the restored disk with the backups manually, per #B6 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting. That usually works, but not always.
If you're not on Lion, or your backups are on a network, there's no way to force it.
Message was edited by: Pondini -- omitted the link!

Time machine backup not appearing in migration asst visible on time capsule

Due to a disk utility error I just completed a fresh install of 10.9.2 when I go to the migration assistant that mac doesn't appear as a source to restore all of my old files back again. However, when I manually open the time capsule I see the hard drive and can copy the user folder but that doesn't help with applications etc... Please advise how to make the time capsule restore my files?

Similar problem here under 10.5.8 (mac mini mid-2007 intel core 2 duo 2GHz, 4GB ram)
Only way to fix it is to restart the computer, it clears it for a while but it always come back within a couple of days or a week. It appears that in my case it does not happen every time time machine runs, but it happens quite frequently. The number of duplicate volumes is also random, most of the times I get 2 or 3 duplicates but I had up to 10 a couple of times. I assumed this might be due to 10.5 but the OP's case suggest it's a time machine problem independent of the OS version. Could it be related to the use of a time capsule? anyone with such problem using an extreme with an attached drive for TM backup?
It gets weirder once you consider that my wife iMac (latest i7) and kids MacBook pros (Dec 2009) (all under 10.6x) do not have the problem using the same time capsule. This would suggest it is caused by specific hardware combinations? (in my case time capsule with mac mini)

Time Machine backups are LARGE

Practically every time TM is backing up, it is a LARGE backup, like 12.2 GB or 11.7GB. Then, sometimes it will be a 1.7 MB backup that takes 8 minutes going 1 KB/second or so.
Ant input would be appreciated.

I have been having the same problem with my backups. I have two 1 TB external HD's in addition to my 185 GB internal HD. I use one of the TB HD's to store alot of my media fies (along with other things). I use the second TB HD as my time machine volume (back's up my internal HD and the other TB HD.).I've been spending all day trying to figure out why my hourly backups were reaching sizes as large as 39 GB when I hadn't added any new data to my computer. I have been using PARALLELS all day and now I'm hoping that that is what is causing my hourly backups to be as large as they are. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I should do if anything?

Time machine backup 4x larger...

hello.
I recently erased an external HD using disk utility.
And now i'm trying to use this external HD to back up my 2 machines, my mac book air (snow leopard), and power pc G5 tower(leopard).
(By the way, this external drive is 300 gigs, and it's from my old ibook G4. And it was used for time machine before, but i wiped clean.)
And so, i used time machine to first backup my mac book air, and for some reason, it used up 150 gigs for this backup, yet my mac book air's HD has only 36 gigs being used.
Also, when I 'get info' on the external drive, it says 232 gig capacity. I know that when a drive is advertised as 300gigs, it's not actually a full 300, but i don't remember this drive being only 232gigs.
Any help?
thank you!

Well, to partition properly, we need to figure out the max size going to be needed by these 2 or 3 backups.
The MB Air throws a bit of a monkey wrench into the works with it's lack of ports & boot options, do you know if it can boot off an external or network drive?
The tiny, (by todays standards), 250 GB drive complicates things also.
Basically I'd consider Partitioning like cutting boards, measure twice, cut once, because re-partitioning while possible is about the most dangerous thing you can do on a drive.
We also need to know if you need to keep versions of the backups.
Right know I'm thinking we need a basic bootable backup of the 2 Macs, (assuming the MBA can boot off another drive), then have either updatable or copies of Home folders, & then an iPhoto backup folder.
As far as utilizing all the space on the 250 GB we'd be better off NOT partitioning it at all.
My normal backup recommendations are...
Get carbon copy cloner to make an exact copy of your old HD to the New one...
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
Or SuperDuper...
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/
Or the most expensive one & my favorite, Tri-Backup...
http://www.tri-edre.com/english/products/tribackup.html
But in my latest test with backing up 10.7.x to an APM partitioned disk was that only CCC was successful, SD said Permissions failed, TB5 I don't recall, but it was the 1st time in 12+ years it let me down. (SD & TB5 wanted GUID partition scheme to backup Lion).
Still, with all 3 there are ways to copy DATA or Folders like your home folder, or iPhoto folder.
Soooo... with just One Partition on the 250, we could say clone the G5 for a bootable backup, then add folders for the MBA & iPhotoBU, & copy the Home Folder from the MBA & the iPhoto folder, or we could make a Disk Image of the MBA on the 250 GB with the G5 clone on it.
Sorry for my lack of knowledge.
Naw, no need, I'm sorry for my lack of knowledge on how to relay the simplicity of this.

Initial Time Machine backup is larger than the HD it's backing up?

Howdy,
I started the initial backup of my MacBook Pro to my TimeCapsule, and it now says that it has backed up 4.1 GB of 159.5 GB. But the internal HD of the MacBook Pro is only 80 GB, and 31.4 GB are free!
Does anyone know what's up with this?
My primary user account is encrypted with FileVault.
Mikael

Mikael Behrens wrote:
Howdy,
I started the initial backup of my MacBook Pro to my TimeCapsule, and it now says that it has backed up 4.1 GB of 159.5 GB. But the internal HD of the MacBook Pro is only 80 GB, and 31.4 GB are free!
Does anyone know what's up with this?
My primary user account is encrypted with FileVault.
I don't use FileVault, but I suspect that is the culprit. Since FV can only be backed up after you log out, it might be causing the problem. I know from reading the posts that FW and TM do not play very well together. It might be calculating your home directory twice. Just a thought.

Mavericks Migration assistant does not see time machine backup of older Lion Mac

Used to have a Macbook Pro. It was stolen (circa July 2014). Luckily I had up to date Time Machine Backups. The Macbook Pro was completely up to date running the latest OSX Lion (circa July 2014) when stolen.
Bought a new Macbook Air just now (Mar 2015).
Plugged in the old Mac's Time Machine Backup Disk, Migration Assistant doesn't see the old Mac's Backups.
So I setup the new Macbook Air without restoring.
Plugged in old backup drive, am able to navigate to old Mac's Time Machine Backups.
Tried running Migration Assistant many time , but still it does not see the the old Mac's Time Machine Backups. (although they continue to show in the drive if I navigate to it)
Pls help so I can migrate the old Mac to the new Mac!!!!

Thanks Turbostar.
Well, I think there should be solution to use TIME CAPSULE restore as it should I mean I bought Time Capsule because it is easy to use and I really do not want to solve any issues or make any workarounds.
I think APPLE should resolve this ASAP. Meantime maybe anybody knows any trick about this issue?

Lion's Time Machine backup crashes Mountain Lion

I have a OS X Lion's Time Machine backup with a few user accounts. Now I need to restore one user account and its data to a MacBook Pro with a replaced hard drive installed with OS X Lion and nothing else. I was told by Apple guys to:
1) upgrade to Mountain Lion first;
2) connect the OS X Lion Time Machine backup, then run the Migration Assistant (Mountain Lion).
The first time I did it, I migrated everything to the MacBook Pro. Then the user accounts and home folders all mixed up. The Lion's applications replaced Mountain Lion's applications of the same names, so and so... Problems gradually surface in two days, that I spent. The Mountain Lion crashed and the MacBook Pro had to reinstall the OS X Lion, then repeat 1) and 2) above.
The second time I did it, I told Apple of my experience, and they told me to uncheck everything else except the user account I wanted to migrate. Then after doing 1) above, and at 2) above, I found that nothing could be unchecked. I told Apple, and they told me to go ahead. After migrated everything, including Applications and the user accounts and data, The Mountain Lion crashed in many native applications, again. (Long story cuts short!)
Now, the thrid time, after wasting my week's time. Apple still tells me to upgrade to Mountain Lion before recovering the user from the TM backup drive. And I have again spent 6 hours in such things as wiping out everything (I guess Apple used Disk Utility to create 1-partition, quickest), install OS X Lion, and I installed Mountain Lion (less than 2 hours inlcuding download and install), then manually "copy" the one user account needed from the last completed (not the "Latest" and not the one with .InProgress) Time Machine dated backup/Machintosh HD/Users to the new INTERNAL Machintosh HD/Users. (The current logged-on account is "test" which is different from the one I need to migrate.)
What next? I shall create a new user account and assign the migrated user as the home folder of the new user account. Does it work? I don't know.
Why not simply restore the user account and data from OS X Lion's Migration Assistant, then upgrade to Mountain Lion? Why?
What about other applications? (e.g. Microsoft Office for Mac 2011), native iPhoto, iTunes....?)
Scenario: If my Time Machine backup was started a year or 2 years ago from Snow Leopard or Lion, and all the way to Mountain Lion. Then one day the drive crashes. Can Time Machine / Migration Assistant give me a one-click-done restoration? Or I need to go through this teasing process again?
Is Time Machine serving its purpose? (Who's purpose? Increase Apple's sales? or Recovering everything for the Mac user with a crashed drive?)

Try the following:
Restore Lion to your HDD. During setup, use setup-assistant to restore your data from TM-Backup.
When this is done upgrade to ML.

Using Remote Disc to transfer Office to Macbook Air and Time Machine backup

Hello,
I just bought the new version of Macbook Air. At the store they said that transferring programs such as Office for Mac was as easy as just opening the sharing folderin preferences on my Imac and new Air and it would be a breeze. Do I have to install anything from the DVD that came with the Macbook Air to enable anything, or will I just, by wifi, start the two machines communicating?
Also, is there any easy way to just backup my last Time Machine backup from my Imac to the new Air, or does this take some doing? Can I backup the Time Machine info while still keeping all of the info on it for my usual work with the Imac?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

First, the instruction book that comes with your MBA will walk you step by step through how to use remote disc. Its not just an open and play thing -- you do have to futz with your other machine, copy over security codes to allow communication, etc -- but it will walk you right through it, so the manual is the place to start.
You can use your Time Machine backup by using the Migration Assistant -- that starts right off the bat when you first initialize your MBA right out of the box, or you can go to Applications>Utilities>Migration Assistant anytime you want.
One thing you should be aware -- you don't really have too many options for the migration -- it will copy over everything from your TIme machine so you better have enough room on your MBA to do that. You can select if you don't want files copied (i.e. music) but that is about it. I did just that wiht my MBP backup on TIme machine -- it was about 100 GB and my new MBA is 120 GB. No problems there, worked perfectly.
Don't do your migration wirelessly -- about 100GB wirelessly on the MBA with a fast cable broadband connection would take 16 - 20 HOURS to do a migration. Connect your MBA via the optional ethernet dongle to an ethernet cable, and hardwire that to an open ethernet port on your router -- 100GB will then take about 2 - 3 hours instead.
ANother thing you should be aware of -- while Apple really touts the Remote Disc and wireless capabilities of the MBA, they are for the birds. Invest the 99.00 in a superdrive. It will be the happiest purchase you make for your MBA. If you install your MS Office via remote disc, for example, your installation will take about an hour. It takes 3 minutes with the superdrive. That is the same for anything you try to do via remote disc. Yeah, it works. It just takes hours and hours of your time. I don't know about you, but I have no interest in waiting an hour for a program to install.
As to your final question -- your Time Machine backup will ALWAYS remain associated with your iMac. After the migration assistant completes, you do not have a connection to that backup on your MBA anymore. You will have to do a fresh backup of your MBA if you want to back it up to your TIme machine. The Time machine makes a specific backup for each computer that you own. You can copy from the backup, but you can't reaccess it later. It will remain accessable to your iMac.

I can't clone (Duplicate) my Time Machine backup properly via Disk Utility

I have an ext. HDD Time Machine backup sitting beside my 10.8 MBP.
I want to create an identical ext. HDD Time Machine backup, because it's safe to have 2 identical HDDs backing up my system.
But when I follow this apple guideline, a problem occurs:
Time Machine: How to transfer backups from the current backup drive to a new backup drive
URL: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5096
The problem is I get a strange path even if I drop "Backups.backupdb" of 3TB1 (The source HDD) onto the root level of 3TB2, the destination HDD (I mean there's nothing in there so I just drag & drop onto the HDD). And the result is my new ext. HDD eating up about 60GB more space.
I have attached pictures of the paths for both Source HDD and Destination HDD, please look.
Why does it alter my file hiearchy like this?
Please help some high-level Mac guy thanks!

Why not just use TM to back up to 2 external drives. TM will alternate between the two when it backs up.
Alternately, you could have a 2 back up strategy like others have using SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner. Both are excellent 3rd party apps to clone your internal drive(s) and both have schedulers.

How do I migrate from a Time Machine backup of a larger hard driver to a smaller hard drive?

My old MacBook Pro has a 1 TB drive. My new one has a 256 GB drive (SSD, as you might guess). I want to use Migration Assistant to move my files from my Time Machine backup to my new MBP. But obviously not all the files are going to fit. If I leave out my music and movies and a couple other things then it will work.
So I selectively migrated just the things that would fit, thinking that I could then fire up Time Machine and restore those other files to an external drive. That doesn't work, though, because my new computer is not recognizing the old computer's Time Machine, and instead is trying to create a new Time Machine area.
What's the best way to solve this problem? The end result I want is for my users and applications to be restored to the new computer, and my movies and music to be restored to external storage.

Aha, I think I found my own answer. I had to Browse Other Backup Disks by Alt-clicking the Time Machine icon. Then I could find the directory I wanted (iTunes Music, for example) and right-click on that to restore to a different location.
Thanks to http://pondini.org/TM/17.html!

Corrupted time machine backup and Migration tool

Thanks in advance to anyone that is able to help. Sorry for the long read.
Recently I replaced my hard drive because it was slowing down and had a very large number of bad sectors. After replacing the HD with a new one I tried to use migration assistant to move my information from the old one. As has happend with many bad hard drives it could not detect the old drive. This always happens if I try to migrate from a drive with bad sectors. The healthy ones always work.
So in an attempt to make the migration tool see the files and migrate them I am trying to use the old drive to spoof a Time machine backup.
First I set my old HD as the location of the new mac's TM backup just to get a TM backup file in place. The fist problem I ran into was that time machine backups are write protected at the kernel level and can't be modified. I found a helper module in the TMsafetynet kext that does this write protection and so, I can delete files in the backup like so.
sudo /System/Library/Extensions/TMsafetynet.kext/Helpers/bypass rm -Rfv /Volumes/TIMEMACHINEDRIVE/Backups.backupdb/whatever files to delete
And so, I removed and modified the files in the time machine backup slightly and migration assistant as well as time machine reflected the changes perfectly without error.
Next I deleted all that was in the time machine backup, I then moved the entire contents of my old drive into this time machine backup file in such a way as to mimic a normal time machine backup.
The good news is that time machine reads my jimmy rigged backup perfectly (which looks pretty wierd since there is no continuity between past and present), But migration assistant now does not see it.
If anyone is able to help that would be awesome. I replace bad hard drives all the time that won't copy with migration assistant, transferring the files manually isnt easy or clean. It's a pain.
Thanks a million for any advice!

Thanks in advance to anyone that is able to help. Sorry for the long read.
Recently I replaced my hard drive because it was slowing down and had a very large number of bad sectors. After replacing the HD with a new one I tried to use migration assistant to move my information from the old one. As has happend with many bad hard drives it could not detect the old drive. This always happens if I try to migrate from a drive with bad sectors. The healthy ones always work.
So in an attempt to make the migration tool see the files and migrate them I am trying to use the old drive to spoof a Time machine backup.
First I set my old HD as the location of the new mac's TM backup just to get a TM backup file in place. The fist problem I ran into was that time machine backups are write protected at the kernel level and can't be modified. I found a helper module in the TMsafetynet kext that does this write protection and so, I can delete files in the backup like so.
sudo /System/Library/Extensions/TMsafetynet.kext/Helpers/bypass rm -Rfv /Volumes/TIMEMACHINEDRIVE/Backups.backupdb/whatever files to delete
And so, I removed and modified the files in the time machine backup slightly and migration assistant as well as time machine reflected the changes perfectly without error.
Next I deleted all that was in the time machine backup, I then moved the entire contents of my old drive into this time machine backup file in such a way as to mimic a normal time machine backup.
The good news is that time machine reads my jimmy rigged backup perfectly (which looks pretty wierd since there is no continuity between past and present), But migration assistant now does not see it.
If anyone is able to help that would be awesome. I replace bad hard drives all the time that won't copy with migration assistant, transferring the files manually isnt easy or clean. It's a pain.
Thanks a million for any advice!

Time machine backup to large to migrate to MBP

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