February 13, 2012

How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

Uh oh, after this backup I'll only have a few GB left on my Time Machine backup drive!

It turns out that you can move Time Machine backups easily, with included OS X tools, and without breaking anything. My old backups are still visible, and I have another 40 GB to work with. Read on for the details!

Tuning Time Machine

Time Machine Preferences

I’ve been very pleased by Apple’s integrated backup application in OS X, Time Machine. It cleverly removes many of the barriers to backup, and makes restore both simple and fun. But I’ve noticed that it’s not quite perfect out of the box. Two default settings in particular bother me: It is set to back up everything, including OS files and caches, and spotlight needlessly indexes your Time Machine drive. Luckily, both are easy fixes.

How To Tune Apple Time Machine To Back Up Less Frequently

Don't look in the Time Machine preferences pane for settings!

I love Time Machine, but it really slows down my laptop while running. Plus, my Drobo automatically spins its drives down after 15 minutes of inactivity and I didn’t want to have it spinning them up all the time. So I set about figuring out how to change the 1-hour Time Machine backup interval.

“Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you.”

Have you seen this dialog box? Is it an error or a help?

Time Machine is one of my favorite Mac OS X features but Apple recently rolled out a “Time Capsule Backup Update”, and included it in Mac OS X 10.6.4, that is causing confusion and concern. In the name of improving “the reliability of your Time Capsule backup,” this update has the unfortunate side-effect of detecting errors in existing backup bundles and forcing users to start a new backup. It happened with two of my Macs so far, so I was keen to find out what’s going on.