Back in December, 2007, when I upgraded my super-duper 24″ iMac to Mac OS X 10.5, I immediately turned on the Time Machine automatic backup program. Seeing as how I had a less-than-half-full 500 GB hard drive in the iMac, I figured I’d be fine using a 500 GB Western Digital MyBook Pro external drive for backup. The Western Digital had a Firewire 800 connection, so back-ups were super fast.
Of course, over time,Time Machine stored more and more stuff that had been changed or deleted and the Western Digital drive got pretty full. So it wasn’t too hard to locate a gigantic upgrade, a 2TB — yes that’s T for terrabyte — Maxtor external drive on sale at Frye’s online web store. It’s not the very latest model, a OneTouch III Turbo Edition, but it has Firewire 800 and 400 ports along with a USB 2.0 connection. I figured that 2 terrabytes out to hold enough backups for some decades to come. We’ll see about that.
Buying the drive was the easy part, though. The harder part was figuring out how to get my Time Machine backups onto the new drive so that my computer would recognize them and keep on building onto the same set. Otherwise, if I’d started fresh, I’d have lost the last year’s worth of cool Time Machine backups of files I’ve since changed or deleted.
The answer, on this tips page, proved to be simple but time consuming. First, I turned Time Machine off. Then I attached the new Maxtor drive to my iMac while the old Western Digital drive was still also attached. Then I opened Disk Utility, clicked on the new disk in the list and clicked on the “restore” tab. Then it was a simple matter of dragging the Western Digital drive icon (where the old Time Machine backups were saved) onto the “Source” box and the icon for the new Maxtor drive onto the “Destination” box. I hit restore and ta-da — everything was cloned automagically onto the new drive, which also got named the same name as the old drive. Only one catch: IT TOOK SEVEN HOURS. I have no idea why but it did.
Once the cloning was complete, I dismounted the old drive, turned Time Machine back on and it continued merrily on its way as if it didn’t even know about the disk swap. Cool if time consuming!
The Maxtor OneTouch III drive is considerably heavier and thicker than the old Western Digital MyBook Pro drive, no surprise since it’s quadruple the capacity. But it’s also much noisier when in operation and for a while afterwards, until it winds down into silent sleep mode. That’s a drag in my little home office but what can you do? Anyone know how to change the sleep settings on an external Maxtor drive?
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