Archive for the ‘time machine’ tag
Using Time Machine upgrade a hard drive
As I write this, my home Mac has just about finished receiving a hard drive upgrade. I had approach the 250GB hard drive’s limit and was needing something far bigger – mainly for photos and movies from my camera.I had read online a few blogs that performed the upgrade by simply making sure that the Time Machine backup was up-to-date, and then removing the old hard drive, installing the new one, booting the OS X installer DVD, formatting the drive and restoring from backup. Sounded like a great option so I thought I’d give it a go to install a nice shiny 1TB hard drive.This blog post noted that the restore process was extremely slow. I had a quick restore with around 230GB being restored in around 2.5 hours. The expected time was a lot slower initially, I think this was because the system files were copied first, and this included a lot more small files that have more overhead associated with reading and writing than say transferring a digital photo or movie – e.g. one 10MB file is faster than transferring 1000 1KB files.It is just booting now, so I’ll know very soon whether it worked or not… stunning it has appeared to work perfectly. Now I just have to wait for Spotlight to re-index everything. But other than that, it was a painless upgrade.It also served an excellent dual purpose of actually testing that the restore process works. Very useful!Now I need to look at setting Time Machine to backup to multiple drives. It sounds like it can be done.