Transferring HD data - Time Machine vs. Bootable Clone

I'm upgrading the HD on an old MacBook Pro (3+ years old) to a SSD drive. But I'm going from 500 GB to 240GB.
I originally was going to move some files off to an external drive but I kept getting ".DS Store file" messages.
So now, I'm considering selectively restoring from a clone or a Time Machine. Does it matter which one?
Also besides the .DS_Store file, here ae some othe issues that have crept in over time:
1)     My Mail program was running a 40 minute delay for a week or so after installing Mavericks, until Mail stopped working entirely.
2)     My Photo Library has been mangled at least once and haven't been able to restore it completely.
3)     I don't know if this is normal or abnormal, but over 2 apple laptops, and 5-6 years, I've 6-8 external/internal HDs have died. The last one was my Time Machine Backup, 2 months ago. I haven't been doing anything that intensive, I'm not usually a game player and I'm usually pretty good at properly ejecting the external HDs. I was able to test 6 of the failed HDs when a friend lent me A friend recently lent me a SATA to USB cable. Plugging the HDs directly into the computer, 5 of 6 drives were functioning, but only 2 of them had usable data. I've already erased and repurposed one to temporarily act as a Time Machine backup.
Do I have too many errors floating around in my Libary, User,Permissions, etc?
Am i better off doing a selective installation from Time Machine, a Clone or starting from scratch with a new copy of Mavericks, restoring apps and files bit by bit whatever I can?
Thanks,
Joel

Gentlemen,
                 Thanks for all your great advice.
The ".div_Store" error messages, the bad Photo Library, and current Mail issues have me concerned with possible errors in Permissions, User, Library files. I'm a total novice at this, I make no claims to understand code or the intracicies underneath the hood of my machine. Maybe I'm being naive or just paranoid about some of these issues I've experienced, but these files have been through 10+ years of OS upgrades and at least 3 different computers. Maybe there has been a clean install or two along the way but something is going on.
I'm concerned with deleting original files, especially with this ".div_store" error message. Every copy has the chance of error even if it's small and there already is some error creeping in. I can perserve the original disk, along side the clone and the Time Machine Backup and do a selective install.
And if I'm willing take my time, I can test all the different possibilities. I've got the original disk, and a clone and a TM backup. I can test them both the TM & the clone, and see how any of the selcted files do after installation.
Heck, after a clean install, I could even start from scratch pull software off old disks, from the Apple Store, etc. and reinstall only the 1/2 dozen programs I really use. I've got way too many programs and files, I never use. It's great to have them available but they are not needed. Before I can try copying current files I really need to the cloud, and test whether the ".div_store" issue comes up going to cloud or bringing them back. If I take my time and make sure I've got apps, programs, files, passwords I need I should probably be able to create everything I need from scratch.
It's not the fast way, but I've got a computer that works, slowly but it works, so I don't need to rush I can test a clone or TM first,. And I've perserved the original and leave open the possibility of even rebuilding from scratch if need be.
                Thanks again to all,
                              Joel

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Time machine vs carbon cloner

Does time machine make carbon cloner redundant?

TM records data and allows you to restore data from time past that you've lost. TM backups can be used to restore a 'complete' system from the past using the DVD Installer. CCC cannot do this other than the one time snapshot/clone it created. Using a CCC cloned volume for a very quick restoration of a failed boot drive can be very useful in a business situation. Speed to recovery isn't so important in a home/entertainment situation.
TM and CCC both have their strengths and weaknesses. Using both, (and don't forget SuperDuper! either) compliment each other. They are both good backup facilities to have onboard with you.

HT4889 Transferred files via time machine and not log in password will not allow me to log in

I have a new MacBook pro, I transferred files via time machine and a removable hard drive. Now new MacBook does not recognize the log in password. What can I do to reset the password?

Did you migrate when you first booted up in Setup Assistant or did you migrate later? When you migrate later it can create a second account, check in Mac HD/Users to see if this is the situation.

Does Time Machine make bootable backups?

I used a beautiful backup program called Backup Simplicity in Tiger that made a bootable Exact duplicate of my HD into my external drive. That's really I want to do.
This morning I tried Time Machine for the first time. It only put a backup folder on my external drive. That's not what I want to do.
So here's my question, if I totally erase my external drive will Time Machine make a bootable duplicate of my HD on my external drive also?
Also, is there a way to schedule Time Machine for backups manually?

No, TimeMachine doesn't create a bootable backup, nor can it be controlled manually. The purpose of TimeMachine is to work behind the scenes backing up changed files. Later, when you realize something is amiss, you can 'go back in time' and fix the problem. Admittedly, I'm a little shaky on the details of just how flexible the retrieval system is since I've not yet played with that feature yet. But as I understand it, if you installed a new program and your computer suddenly started going nuts, you'll be able to use TimeMachine to restore your computer to the point before you installed that program. Or, if you realize you improperly edited a file, you'll be able to retrieve the file prior to that editing session.
Apple's team realized three things: 1) most of us don't take the time to perform backups even though we know we should be doing it. 2) most of us don't really understand how to develop a good backup strategy. 3) computers today are so powerful that most of the time the CPU isn't working hard at all and those extra cycles might as well be put to use doing something useful. Hence, TimeMachine's design.
As you noticed, TimeMachine makes a folder and does its incremental backups inside. Since I have an external drive that is much larger than my boot/data drive, I'll continue to clone my boot drive to this external once a week, just as I've been doing. If disaster strikes and I need to use the computer right now, I can do so and at worst my data will be one week out of date. (I should then be able to use TimeMachine to retrieve the missing data but the important thing is that I'm up and running again as soon as I've rebooted.) Later (or if I have the time right away) I'll use TimeMachine to restore/replace my boot drive.

Transferring Info From Time Machine Stopped?

I have a 2012 Macbook Pro. Disk Utility said there was an error with my hard drive and I would have to reformat it. So I erased the hard drive, reinstalled Yosemite, and began to retrieve my Time Machine back-up. On the "Transferring Your Information" screen, the activity has stopped at "about 11 minutes remaining" (keyword: about!) for the past few hours. My external hard drive power indicator is no longer on; I assume it is asleep, but when I touch the casing I know it is still powered on. If it matters, it is a Seagate 2 TB external hard drive.
What should I do? Wait overnight and see if something magical will happen? Do I power off and start all over again? Should I piece meal my documents and data instead of using Time Machine?
Thanks!

I have a 2012 Macbook Pro. Disk Utility said there was an error with my hard drive and I would have to reformat it. So I erased the hard drive, reinstalled Yosemite, and began to retrieve my Time Machine back-up. On the "Transferring Your Information" screen, the activity has stopped at "about 11 minutes remaining" (keyword: about!) for the past few hours. My external hard drive power indicator is no longer on; I assume it is asleep, but when I touch the casing I know it is still powered on. If it matters, it is a Seagate 2 TB external hard drive.
What should I do? Wait overnight and see if something magical will happen? Do I power off and start all over again? Should I piece meal my documents and data instead of using Time Machine?
Thanks!

Problems "transferring" files from time machine to new hard drive

I was experieincing the spinning beach ball of death so I replaced my hard drive with a new one. I am running mountain lion (10.8.2) and the new Hard drive has two partions - one for "start up" which I was able to use migration assisant to move over my applications from my time machine. The problem I am having is that I can't figure out how to get my user account data transferred to my the data partition (journal extended) on my new hard drive.
When I enter time machine I can't "see" my last back updates before I changed hard drives.
I put my old hard drive in a case and it "isn't working" so I can't just copy data from my old hard drive. It did work initially but now it doesn't mount and I can't see it in disk utility.
Any Ideas on how I can get my user data off my time machine back up?
I forgot to mention that when I go into my external hard drive containing my time machine via finder and click on the folder with my user data I'm not able to open the various files - they have a red "-" and it says, The folder “Desktop” can’t be opened because you don’t have permission to see its contents. In disk utility I can't run repair disk permision on my time machine drive because it is grayed out.
Thanks - Dave

I see. Don't do that. I do not believe using Migration Assistant is a valid method of accomplishing what you intend.
Furthermore, unless you are using the "Enter Time Machine" feature, you really shouldn't pick and choose what you want to copy from a Time Machine backup... "no user serviceable parts inside". You can certainly find and individual files and folders in the Finder, but you will run into the permissions problems you describle. I would not attempt to circumvent those protections.
As I understand Time Machine, you must either restore a volume from a Time Machine backup, thereby erasing the volume first, or restore individual files and folders by using "Enter Time Machine" when the backup has already been properly designated for the source.
Since your replacement hard disk - the source, now - is technically new, the latter is not an option. It's as if you were trying to restore to a different computer. This can't be done.

Time machine VS bootable copy

well you get the picture. which do you think i should use?

A clone is essentially a snapshot of the state of the drive at one moment in time. Time Machine backups are essentially a series of snapshots of selected (usually most) items on the drive at many different moments in time.
IOW, if you delete some file or change it & then clone the drive, you will not have a backup of the prior form of that file. But if you use Time Machine, you will. For this reason, the backups of Time Machine & similar backup utilities are sometimes called archival backups.
Archival backups protect you from a lot of calamities that clones do not. For example, say you are working on a term paper or other project. Over days or weeks you add & edit content, saving the changes to the document each time you close it, & dutifully clone the drive every night. Then, to your horror, when you open the document one day you realize that during yesterday's editing that you inadvertently deleted 10 important paragraphs of it during a cut & paste, or did something similar.
You have no backup of the document with those 10 paragraphs intact because the clone has only one version of the document, the same one that preserved the last inadvertent edit. If you had been relying on Time Machine instead, you could simply go back to any time prior to the disastrous edit & get a version of the document with those paragraphs intact. The same applies to accidentally deleting a file or overwriting it with a different file of the same name.
OTOH, a Time Machine backup is not bootable, so you cannot as easily recover from a hard drive error like file corruption or "roll back" the OS to a previous state. And since TM backs up each unique version of a file, it typically requires much more HD space than a clone for best results. However, TM does provide methods to deal with HD space issues, including automatically deleting the oldest backups when needed, the option to exclude selected folders from its backups, & an option to manually remove all copies of a file from an existing TM backup. With these provisions, it is actually sometimes possible to use a backup volume smaller than what a clone would require.
Because of all this, if I had to choose one or the other, I would opt for Time Machine. Of course, it is better to have both, & with the price of huge drives as low as they are, the partitioning solution already mentioned is usually a viable one, even for small budgets.

Getting a new macbook, questions about transferring files with Time Machine

I now plan to switch computers to one of the new Macbook pros. Since I now use Time Machine, I'm planning to just upload the backup to the new computer when I get it. the backups are able to be transferred to a new one for an upgrade right?
Also, I had to switch hard drives once about 2 years ago, and when I did, the backup DVD I made for my iTunes didn't remember which of my ~2000 songs are checked and which aren't, leaving me to have to do it manually over the course of a few weeks. Will Time Machine do this for me?
I'm also running Leopard atm, will there be any problems uploading all the info since the new computer will be running Snow Leopard, and the backup was made through Leopard?

falkner09 wrote:
I now plan to switch computers to one of the new Macbook pros. Since I now use Time Machine, I'm planning to just upload the backup to the new computer when I get it. the backups are able to be transferred to a new one for an upgrade right?
Not via a full system restore. You want to use +Setup Assistant+ when the new Mac first starts up. You can transfer directly from the old Mac, or it's backups. See [Setting up a new Mac from an old one or its backups|http://web.me.com/pondini/AppleTips/Setup.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of the +Snow Leopard > Installation and Setup+ forum).
Firewire from the old Mac will be fastest, by far. If you use your network, connect via Ethernet cable; wireless will take an eternity.
Also, I had to switch hard drives once about 2 years ago, and when I did, the backup DVD I made for my iTunes didn't remember which of my ~2000 songs are checked and which aren't, leaving me to have to do it manually over the course of a few weeks. Will Time Machine do this for me?
It should.
I'm also running Leopard atm, will there be any problems uploading all the info since the new computer will be running Snow Leopard, and the backup was made through Leopard?
That's what +Setup Assistant+ is all about; it transfers everything except the old version of OSX.

Are time machine backups bootable?

My hard disc is making weird noises and im expecting it to blow anytime soon, so I need to make sure I have regular backups that will be able to restore another drive to exactly as my current drive. I used to use super duper on OSX4.11 which was perfect, but seeing as time machine is already installed thought I might as well use it if I can.
So when my hard drive crashes can i just reload a new drive from the time machine backup and my system will be exactly the same as it is now, just like it would with super duper?
Thanks in advance.

The Mighty Doosh wrote:
My hard disc is making weird noises and im expecting it to blow anytime soon, so I need to make sure I have regular backups that will be able to restore another drive to exactly as my current drive. I used to use super duper on OSX4.11 which was perfect, but seeing as time machine is already installed thought I might as well use it if I can.
So when my hard drive crashes can i just reload a new drive from the time machine backup and my system will be exactly the same as it is now, just like it would with super duper?
Thanks in advance.
time machine backups themselves are not bootable but you can restore your entire system from them. to do that boot from the snow leopard restore DVD and choose "restore system from backup" from the Utilities menu.

Transferring adobe onto time machine

hello, I have adobe cs5.
it seems my macbook has issues and I need to reinstall the whole OS. this means everything gets deleted. I backed everything up onto time machine and plan on only placing certain things back onto my hard drive.
one of those things is the whole suite.
how do i deactivate/reactivate adobe. or will the time machine take care of this and everything will transfer over?
thanks

shamguy4 wrote:
plan on only placing certain things back onto my hard drive.
That's unlikely to work. Unless you do a full system restore, you'll almost certainly have to reinstall CS5 from the original discs.
See Transferring Applications for an explanation.

External Drive for Manual Data & Time Machine Information?

Hi All,
I'm new to the MAC world, and I'm loving every minute of it. However, with my continued use of the MAC and populating it with data, I now want to move some files off to a External HDD for safe keeping.
What I'm trying to figure out is if I buy a External HDD for my MAC, can I use it for automated time machine use as well as manually moving and creatng directories for my data?
So here's what I'm thinking coming from a PC world on this extenral HDD:
1 - A Directory for my downloaded software from the internet
2 - A Directory for my Manual File saves (Documents, Files, Pictures, and iTunes)
3 - A Final directory for my Time Machine backups.
However I don't expect to leave this drive into my MBP all the time, so is it worth while doing it this way? Or should I go for a smaller External HDD to do my manual file backups and look at getting a time capsule for the time machine backups?
The only concern that I have with the time capsule is that I already have a wireless router in the household, and don't want that items features to conflict with the primary router. Though I do like the idea of the NAS technology to keep that data online and backuped without havng to manually plug a drive into my computer all the time.
Any advice you can offer to get me to my ultimate point of a space for my manual data backups and preferabbly time machine backups would be appreicated.
Additionaly thoughts about not using time machine are definately appreciated, based on the way I want to backup the data.
I should also mention that I would prefer to keep the cost low, as the MBP acquisition of course consumed some financial resources. But again the saving of my data is equally very important as well!

yes you can do this but you should partition the external hard drive in at least two parts. keep one partition dedicated solely to Time machine backups. Do not put any other data on that partition. there are a number of situations when you might need to erase the TM partition and start backups from scratch and having other data there makes it quite inconvenient.
Another point is that you should back up all your data, not just the data on the internal drive. a backup is a second copy of the data, not the only copy. so if you keep other stuff on the external you should back it up too. therefore, if your internal drive is not big enough to hold all your data, ideally, you should get two external drives. one for extra storage and the other for TM backups of everything. TM can back up both internal and external drives. a TM drive can be a regular drive or a Time capsule. that's up to you. and of course, there are financial considerations here but you'll have to figure those out yourself.

I have just changed the hard drive on my computer and I transferred everything use time machine (OSX Mavericks). I now have error 150:30. What do I do?

I obviously need to reinitialise CS4 in some way but how. I cannot enter any programs to change any settings. I have the serial number of my organisations license.

Transferring using Time Machine will not work with Adobe applications. Many small but necessary files will not be put in the proper place.
You'll have to first remove everything you copied using the Adobe Cleaner tool:
Use the CC Cleaner Tool to solve installation problems | CC, CS3-CS6
Then download the CS4 installer with the link Mylenium provided.

Restore from Time Machine, not bootable?

I had some problems on my hard drive, so I erased my OS X partition and restored it from a Time Machine backup. Now, the OS X partition will not boot. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do?
I do also have a Windows XP partition installed via Boot Camp.
edit: As far as I know, I did not exclude the system folders from my Time Machine backups.
Message was edited by: kjb

Before trying the restore, I had a problem with, for example, System Profiler crashing. I first ran Disk Utility from the boot drive, and when I tried to verify the disk, it suggested running Repair Disk from the install DVD. When I tried to repair the disk, using the Disk Utility on the Snow Leopard DVD, it tried three times to repair the disk before giving up, with "invalid node structure" each time. It then suggested erasing the partition and restoring from a backup; after that, I get the circle with the line through it when trying to boot OS X.

Restore Data-Time Machine or Migration Assitant

I had to re-install Mac OS X on my MacBook after installing Windows 7 and Microsoft Office. I am trying to restore all my data and can not seem to do so.

This Migration Assistant should work fine.
17" 2.2GHz i7 Quad-Core MacBook Pro  8G RAM  750G HD + OCZ Vertex 3 SSD Boot HD 
Got problems with your Apple iDevice-like iPhone, iPad or iPod touch? Try Troubleshooting 101

I have a powerbook G4 with macosx10.5.8 (as far as I know the latest possible OS with powerPC). Can I use Time Machine to restore my data on an Intel Macbook?

I have a powerbook G4 with macosx10.5.8 (as far as I know the latest possible OS with powerPC). Can I use Time Machine to restore my data on an Intel Macbook?

Well the newer TimeMachine model as stated in current Support pages isn't directly compatible on OS X 10.5 now, as noted in above link provided.
What OS X does your newer MacBook have running in it? (Not linux?)
With the current setup you have there may be a way -among other details in the support page- to do the migration of data from Mac, including a subnote on Time Machine, in a section below the main article with triangle by it, from links here:
•OS X: How to migrate data from another Mac using Mavericks 10.9:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5872
•OS X: How to migrate data from another Mac using Mountain Lion 10.8 and Earlier:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4889
In the support articles there are various troubleshooting and help items about the technology, some data back some time and whatever still stands would be there. Some archives are no longer current and say so.
Perhaps someoone still using older PPC Macs and Leopard 10.5, will say how to backup into a G4 PowerBook, from a Time Machine.
Unless the TimeMachine backup from the older PPC G4 PowerBook is used in the migration process of transferring personal account files from there to a new MacBook running (?) OS X. This probably could be done. You may be able to access older libraries, such as iPhoto, iTunes, etc and import them from the archive, to a newer Intel-based MacBook.
Sorry for any confusion.
I'll more carefully reply in the future.
Good luck & happy computing!
PS: a different direction on archives, time machine, clones, and other devices:
•About Time Machine - Time Machine vs. Clones and Archives:
http://pondini.org/TM/Clones.html
•Apple OS X and Time Machine Tips:
http://pondini.org/TM/Home.html
{edited to add link details}

Transferring HD data - Time Machine vs. Bootable Clone

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