05-04-2011, 01:21 PM

Ok, I am planning on making the jump to getting an Airport Extreme and a beefy external hard drive for use as my Time Machine drive. That part I have down and while the equipment is not in my hands, it will be shortly.

I have been using a different external hard drive for my Time Machine backups now. This drive is also my iTunes media drive. My whole goal is to use the drive on the APX as both my Time Machine backup drive and my iTunes backup drive.

My questions are these:
1. Is it possible to migrate my existing Time Machine backups to the new drive and if so, how?

2. Would it be possible with either Applescript or Automator to create a task that would automatically backup my iTunes media folder once a week (or so) to the new external hard drive from my existing one that will be in use?

3. When I move to this new drive, I will be changing the name of my existing one, which will change the path of the iTunes media. I had issues with pathing in the library when moving from Win7 to OSX using an external (no e in OSX). Would it be as simple as changing the "iTunes Media folder location" to the new name? Would it be better to uncheck the two checkboxes in that frame (Keep iTunes media folder organized and Copy files to ...) before changing the name and location?

05-05-2011, 01:29 AM

I think you can use Disk Utility to copy to another hard drive using restore with the old drive listed in source and the new drive in destination. I have always been told to keep
a TM drive all TM if its connected USB to an Extreme. TM should back up your iTunes anyway or at least mine does.
May want to read this. Mac OS X v10.6: How to transfer your backups from your current hard drive to a new hard drive

If you upgrade to a new hard drive with a larger capacity, you may want to transfer your existing Time Machine backups to it before using it for regular backups. To keep your existing backups on your new, larger backup hard drive, follow these steps:

Connect your new hard drive.
In Disk Utility, make sure it has a GUID partition and is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). If needed, reformat the drive as Mac OS Extended with a GUID partition. If you do not know how, see the steps in this article. Note: Back up any data on the hard drive before you format it.
Select the new drive's icon on the desktop and choose Get Info from the File menu.
Make sure "Ignore ownership on this volume" is not enabled.
Open Time Machine preferences in System Preferences.
Slide the Time Machine switch to Off.
In Finder, double-click the current backup hard drive to open its Finder window.
Drag the folder "Backups.backupd" to the new hard drive.
Enter an administrator user name and password, then click OK to start the copying process. This may take some time to complete because all your backups will be copied.
In Time Machine System Preferences click "Select Disk…"
Select your new hard drive, then click "Use for Backup."