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ibook_steve · Mar 15, 2008, 01:59 AM

On the advice of some of the fine folks here and the Notebooks forum, I purchased a 320 GB WD Passport drive for the sole purpose of swapping out the 120 GB drive in my 2.33 GHZ MBP. I decided to use SuperDuper! instead of Disk Utility so I could do the full backup to the drive while it's still in its original case. This seems to have worked perfectly and I can boot off of the external drive.

My question has to do with Time Machine. While booted with the external drive, I tried to start a TM backup to my TM drive (another external drive). The "Preparing" stage went on for quite a long time, leading me to believe that it was getting ready to perform a full initial backup instead of an incremental backup. I stopped the backup, but maybe I didn't need to. My question is: how do I make sure my TM backups "continue" with the new 320 GB drive? Does the name of the new drive need to be the same as the name of the old drive?

By the way, the WD Passport I got has a completely different case from the ones I've seen online as well as the dismantling videos on YouTube with the obnoxious music (why can't people narrate their instructional YouTube videos instead of overlaying them with a useless sound track?). The cases I've seen online are in two pieces, have a blue light, and the videos show that you can almost take them apart with one hand. The one I just got has a case shaped like a U that wraps around the drive and has a single white LED in the shape of the USB symbol right by the USB port. It has tracks that the drive slides into when assembled and then snaps in. Unfortunately, I cracked some of these tracks when I tried figuring out on my own how to disassemble the case. Has anybody else seen this new Passport case?

Thanks,
Steve

OreoCookie · Mar 15, 2008, 04:23 AM

The drive name is crucial. The Time Machine backup is stored under Backup > [computer name] > [volume]. It's case-sensitive. If you have changed neither, it should continue with its backups. At least that's what it did on my father's new Mac mini. If you have changed the name of the volume, Time Machine will (sensibly enough) assume you're backing up a different volume and start from scratch. That's why it probably took so long.

Art Vandelay · Mar 15, 2008, 10:09 AM

Originally Posted by ibook_steve

I decided to use SuperDuper! instead of Disk Utility so I could do the full backup to the drive while it's still in its original case.

I don't get this. What does the case have anything to do it? You could have used Disk Utility too.

Ditto what OreoCookie said.

ghporter · Mar 15, 2008, 10:41 AM

I'm guessing that it's simpler to do the backup while the drive is still mounted in its external case, and then restore it internally.

Art Vandelay · Mar 15, 2008, 10:56 AM

That part I get but that doesn't make sense as the reason for choosing one utility over another.

ibook_steve · Mar 15, 2008, 11:26 AM

I like the options available in SuperDuper as well as the status messages it gives. Doing a full copy is possible without registering, so it seemed like a good way to go.

So if the volume name is the key factor in all of this, you're saying that, in general, once you've started making TM backups, you can never change the drive name! I guess it makes sense. I wanted to differentiate the new drive with a new name, but I don't want to start my backups over. I'll stick with the old name.

Steve

Art Vandelay · Mar 15, 2008, 11:43 AM

Originally Posted by ibook_steve

I like the options available in SuperDuper as well as the status messages it gives. Doing a full copy is possible without registering, so it seemed like a good way to go.

Ah, that makes sense. The above quote implied that since it was in an external case, you needed to use SuperDuper instead.

CharlesS · Mar 15, 2008, 11:48 AM

Originally Posted by ibook_steve

So if the volume name is the key factor in all of this, you're saying that, in general, once you've started making TM backups, you can never change the drive name! I guess it makes sense.

Since I've got a new Mac coming in the mail, and since my current hard drive name of "Charles' G5" won't be appropriate, I decided to look into this. If you read the .Backup.log files inside a Time Machine backup, you'll find that although it gives the folder name containing the backup the same name as your volume, Time Machine also keeps track of the UUID for the drive itself and also the UUID for its FSEvents database. Which makes sense - going by the drive name alone would be a very un-Mac-like way of doing things. So I tried changing the name of my drive and starting a Time Machine backup, and sure enough, it was a normal incremental backup, finishing in 9 minutes, which is fairly typical of Time Machine on my system (I'm really hoping that the dual cores and FW800 on my new machine will speed this up a bit). So, what you might want to do is to either:

1. Rename the old hard drive to what the new one's name is going to be before you do the final Time Machine backup on the old machine, or:

2. Name the new machine's hard drive to the same name the old one had, and then change it after the initial Time Machine backup.

OreoCookie · Mar 16, 2008, 02:18 AM

Thanks for looking into this, I've never renamed the harddrive without replacing the drive itself (or changing the whole computer). Glad to hear, Apple is smarter than this

ibook_steve · Mar 16, 2008, 01:53 PM

Interesting. I'll have to try this out.

Steve

ibook_steve · Mar 18, 2008, 01:09 AM

I'm not sure that the trick is working. My old hard disk name was "MBP" (I know, I'm boring) and I wanted the new disk named "Big MBP". Before the transplant, I changed the name of the old disk to "Big MBP" and performed a TM backup. This backup went quickly, as expected, and the backup is named "Big MBP" on the TM drive. After the transplant, I renamed the new disk "Big MBP" as desired, but the "Preparing" stage is taking a long time. I'm going to let it sit and see what happens, but I'm afraid it's going to try to start over with a full initial backup.

Steve

ibook_steve · Mar 18, 2008, 02:33 AM

Update: Well, it would appear that the earlier assertion that the continuation of a TM based on the drive name is correct. As I said, I did my last backup with the old hard drive with the new hard drive's name. After the transplant, going into the TM app, all the old backups are blacked out. As soon as I changed the drive name of the new drive to "MBP," I could once again access all the old backups. So I'm betting that once I finish a backup with the old name on the new drive, I'll be free to change the name of the drive with no problem.

Well that wasn't confusing at all! ;-)

Steve