MacFilter: Upgraded my hard drive using SuperDuper to clone, but Time Machine backed up the entire drive after the swap. How to prevent this?

August 30, 2008 4:47 PM

MacFilter: Upgraded my hard drive using SuperDuper to clone, but Time Machine backed up the entire drive after the swap. How to prevent this?

I used SuperDuper to clone my internal laptop hard disk onto a larger hard disk in an external enclosure. The cloning process went fine, and I swapped the internal drive with the cloned one. Works great.

Unfortunately, next time I ran Time Machine, it backed up the entire contents of the freshly cloned drive onto the TM drive, thus eating up ~80GB of my TM drive. Now I need to replace my internal drive again (the replacement was too power hungry) but don't want TM to eat up another 80 GB.

Any way to prevent Time Machine from trying to back up the cloned drive?

posted by kenliu to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

From what I understand, and if I'm reading your question correctly, TM is incremental, not every backup will be 80GB. If you have an 80GB disk image of the clone sitting on the drive, then yes, it will backup every time unless you put the clone disk image in an excluded folder in Time Machine options.
posted by limited slip at 5:34 PM on August 30, 2008

If you changed the name of the volume, Time Machine assumes it's a new drive and makes a new complete backup.
posted by BryanPayne at 7:40 PM on August 30, 2008

Response by poster: @limited slip
No, you misunderstood. I cloned the old drive (which was already using TM) to the new drive, then swapped. I would have expected TM just to back up changed files instead of all of them.

@BryanPayne
I created the clone drive as "Macintosh HD new" initially, then changed the name back to "Macintosh HD" before booting up and using TM again. Are you telling me that TM doesn't think the new drive is the same drive and I've lost my old incremental backups? ('cause that would suck)
posted by kenliu at 9:44 PM on August 30, 2008

You can exclude whole volumes or folders from Time Machine by adding them to the Do not back up list.

1. Open System Preferences and click the Time Machine item.
2. Click the Options button.
3. Drag items you want excluded from the Time Machine backup into the window.
4. Click Done.

posted by pmbuko at 5:55 AM on August 31, 2008

Best answer: pmbuko: If (s)he did that, then his/her harddrive would never be backed up again because it had been added to the list of excluded item.

To the OP: This issue has been discussed at the SuperDuper forms.
posted by Brian Puccio at 7:19 AM on August 31, 2008 [1 favorite]