Thread

I’m upgrading my macbook pro hdd to a much bigger one and have decided to use time machine to restore my data to my new drive.

So i’ve done the first back up and it says that it has backed up 79gb. Thing is, my hard drive claims to be using 93gb.

What is this mystery 14gb?

Has anyone else done this with time machine??

time machine doesn’t back up everything…if I have my facts straight, it only backs up your home folder and applications folder, but I could be wrong.

When I first started using Time Machine I swear that I read instructions for doing a full system restore from it. I assumed that this meant it was capturing everything…

I’ll have to do some digging - unless someone else has direct experience.

I have read a few things that say you can do a full system restore from it (you have to install leopard first) i just wonder what this missing 14gb is! I’m sure leopard isn’t that large!

Actually, with all the printer drivers (5gb) and the iLife applications, Leopard has quite a footprint.  If you have enough space you could use carbon copy cloner to make a complete image of the drive in addition to the tm backup - as an extra precaution for the hardware upgrade.

5gb of printer drivers? Is that a typo!?

Carbon copy cloner sounds good to me, i think i do have enough space, i’ll give it a whirl.

Cheers!

It wasn’t a typo, but it’s a little high.  Apparently it’s closer to 3.5gb.

I’ve also used a nice freeware program called SuperDuper that works really well for all kinds of cloning, etc on Mac.

I think I’ll take a look at Carbon Copy - never heard of it.

Time Machine does some pretty impressive mojo under the hood with filesystem notifications and hard linking. It’s possible it could have some obscure bug that would bite at the worst moment, but I’ve yet to hear about anything, and anecdotally it’s worked well for me to do a full OS restore, and grab a couple old incarnations of single files.

Not sure what that missing 14 GB is, but (a) swapfiles and cache files don’t get backed up, and (b) sometimes different drives/filesystems have different block sizes, so files of identical bits can be different sizes on the drive (not sure if this is still the case with Journaled HFS+). Maybe there’s also some kind of on-the-fly compression?

Ah well, i’ll still have the old drive if i’m missing anything. Now all i need it a sata laptop hard drive caddy….