A wrinkle in Time Machine
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in utilities, Leopard, Apple on July 2, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Those of us lucky enough to get a new Mac from time to time (hum hum) will be thanking Apple for Time Machine. It takes all the hassle out of setting up a new Mac, a task that used to take days to install, register, configure and upgrade all the applications. As our recent experience found, Time Machine archives are a rich ground for ardent tinkerers who never RTFM. And if they do they don’t believe all they read.
Apple’s System installer will ask whether you want Migration Assistant to use a Time Machine archive to set up a newly installed System. It might take an hour or so depending on how fast the Time Machine back-up can be transferred but eventually all applications, preferences and Users are copied faithfully from one Mac to the other.
Unfortunately, a Time Machine archive is CPU-type specific. Once the installer had finished, moving from a Power PC to an Intel Mac meant it wasn’t possible to continue using the old Time Machine drive as an archive for the new Mac. More correctly, it wasn’t until we discovered a little undocumented wrinkle.
How not to use Time Machine (but it worked)
Usually a Time Machine archive is copied from one disk to another via the Restore tab in Apple’s Disk Utility. It makes an exact copy of the hard drive but this will not work if the Mac’s processor-type has changed. The System details contained in the archive cannot be used on the new, different processor and the copying fails. This can take some hours because Disk Utility will check the whole of the archive before stopping.
Another way to copy a Time Machine archive is via a disk duplicator such as Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. Again, they make bit-by-bit copies of the disk but aren’t fussed what the data contains. The resulting, copied drive will mount on your new Mac but be unavailable to Time Machine and your back-ups contained in a folder named whatever your last Mac was called.
However, if you select the drive for Time Machine to back-up to for your new Mac, a folder is created on it ready for your Time Machine archive. From the Finder, copy all the contents from the old Mac’s folder into the new one. Time Machine will see the data as part of the new Mac’s archive and you have access to your old data.
It is easy, if long winded, to use Time Machine to erase all occurrences of any System or library data that might upset your new Mac, by clicking on its little drop-down gear menu thingie and selecting Delete All Back-ups of …
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Loading ...Comment by Jacques Daviault - July 2, 2008 on 8:25 pm
This blog entry was very interesting Mark. I have found Time Machine to be a great little feature but that Apple’s documentation of its operation to be scant. In fact, Apple’s documentation of Leopard, Tiger and back to Mac OS 8.x has been wholly inadequate. I can understand not spending the money to print expensive manuals, but n easy to search, easy to find in-depth online owner’s manual isn’t asking too much. Time Machine is the least of the offenders… try using Automator without any documentation… eeek.
This being said I’ll poke into the nuances of Time Machine, as my 60GB drive is already full and I’ll be needing a new Time Machine back-up drive.
As for using it to transfer my data to a new machine… by the time I can afford a new computer Scotty will be able to beam over my data. Assuming that happens within the next 2 years of course. 
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