Time Machine - letting it erase oldest backups...

[zeppo]

Suppose I create my first full back up on January 1st and then, on June 6th, before the backup drive has gotten full, do a full restore of that January 1st image. Then before having made any changes, a scheduled full back up takes place on June 7th. So if I understand correctly, if later on July 1st (with back up drive still not having become full) I were to restore the January 1st back up or restore the June 7th backup, I would be essentially be going back to the same setup on my computer with either restore. In other words, on July 1st when I'm choosing to which restore to return, Jan 1st restore = Jun 7th restore (for all practical purposes.). If that is the case, assume then I don't do another restore on July 1st, and my backup drive become full on August 1st and starts erasing/writing over my oldest backups, beginning with my January 1st backup. Let's say I still have all my backups available to restore going back to February-- older ones have been written over by more current backups. By having done the restore on June 6th that was in turn fully backed up on June 7th, have I essentially preserved the January 1st state of my computer? Or does the overwriting of the January 1st backup by time machine F* with the backup made on June 7th? I wouldn't think it would, but not being a techie, just want to make sure.

 

[chscag]

Simply put, Time Machine will overwrite the oldest backup with the current backup if your drive becomes full. As far as the restore is concerned, Migration Assistant will use the latest backup. A manual restore is up to you to choose which date to backup from. You're making it over complicated.....

 

[zeppo]

Yes, as I stated in my post, I understand that the oldest back up will be overwritten first. I have no plans to use Migration Assistant. But to me, it would be nice if you could put a "do not erase" marker on certain backups in case you wanted to be sure you could go back to that point in time without having to worry about it being overwritten. That option is not available. So once the January 1st backup has been overwritten, there's no going back to it. Unless….

Unless the June 6th restore of the January 1st state is still available and ready for me to return to via my June 7th backup (not compromised by the fact that the January 1st backup has been overwritten.)

So my question was whether the June 7th backup was a legitimate way to accomplish "preserving" the January 1st state of my computer after the January 1st backup had been overwritten.

Can anyone reassure me if this works?

 

[chscag]

There's no assurance that what you want to do will work. Just purchase another external hard drive and continue your backups on that. That's what I did when my original Time Machine backup drive became full. Time Machine preferences allow for using several drives for backup and will remember which is current.

Also, keeping backups longer than 6 months may not be useful especially when programs and even OS X itself is updated quite often.

 

[zeppo]

Thanks. To your point, if you feel backup beyond 6 months are not useful, then in your case you don't need several drives. When your second drive is full you can go back to your original drive and wipe over it rather than go to a third.

For myself though I think your are going to run updates anytime you do a full restore, so I don't think it's going to be much more of a chore to do so on a restore from a year and a half ago vs 6 months. But what I probably really need to do instead of buying another backup drive is just by a cloning software and use that instead.

I don't keep a lot of files on my computer that aren't already backed up on a dvd, thumb drive, or cloud as well. So time machine isn't as important in terms of potentially having important files corrupted and needing to retrieve them. I just like knowing I can get back to a more pristine state if I ever need to should anything buggy start happening. I also just like knowing how things work.

 

[chscag]

Using cloning software is a good idea. I actually do two backups, not just one. I use Carbon Copy Cloner for one backup and Time Machine for the other. That requires two external hard drives on my desktop but they don't take up much space. And since I use a 27" iMac in my home office, I have a rather large desk to put everything on.

 

[zeppo]

I was going to restore a older more pristine "state" from right after I updated to Mountain Lion, run updates, and then update to Mavericks. But now I see that the Western Digital My Passport for Mac drive that I use for Time Machine is giving people trouble with Mavericks. Other WD drives as well. So while I was thinking of just wiping the Passport and starting a new with the Time Machine backups, now it looks like I may just buy another drive anyway (after I find out which are not having problems with Maverick.) Or perhaps I'll just stick with Mountain Lion and not worry about Maverick.

 

[chscag]

There's no problem with the Western Digital drives themselves. It's the Western Digital software that comes with the drive that's causing the errors. When I purchased my Western Digital Passport USB 3 drive, I reformatted it and wiped out the software which was included. I have had no problems whatsoever with the drive and I use it daily to make my Carbon Copy Cloner backups.

 

[zeppo]

The issue was with the firmware update, which to my understanding was put out by WD to deal with Maverick. Do you use Maverick? If so, did you do the firmware update? If you didn't, perhaps the firmware update actually is intended to resolve some conflict the previous firmware had with the WD's software's interfacing with Maverick, rather than a conflict between the old firmware and maverick. I would be happy to ignore the WD software and just reformat with the mac's Disk Utility. The problem I saw that people were having was after the firmware update they couldn't get anything to recognize the drive anymore, though I wonder if these were people that also used it for storage of files in addition to Time Machine backups. thanks

edit: all that said, I am not techy enough to know if the mac Disk Utility formatting of the drive overrides the firmware on the drive in someway, or if it is strictly loading software. My limited understanding is that the Disk Utility formatting is just dealing with software on the drive, but if it actually bypasses the WD firmware as well, then I'm sold.

 

[chscag]

Yes, I use Mavericks and I did not update the firmware for my Western Digital Passport. I'm of the belief "if it's not broke, don't fix it". We have had some of our forum members report problems with their WD Passport drives and Mavericks. As far as I know, it was the software which was causing the problem. And, I'm really not sure what the firmware update was suppose to fix? The WD Passport drives are shipped from the factory formatted for use with Windows (NTFS). They do have a model for the Mac but it's $25 more which is kind of silly when you can easily reformat the drive that is for Windows and is less expensive.

 

[pigoo3]

Yes, as I stated in my post, I understand that the oldest back up will be overwritten first. I have no plans to use Migration Assistant. But to me, it would be nice if you could put a "do not erase" marker on certain backups in case you wanted to be sure you could go back to that point in time without having to worry about it being overwritten. That option is not available. So once the January 1st backup has been overwritten, there's no going back to it. Unless….

Unless the June 6th restore of the January 1st state is still available and ready for me to return to via my June 7th backup (not compromised by the fact that the January 1st backup has been overwritten.)

So my question was whether the June 7th backup was a legitimate way to accomplish "preserving" the January 1st state of my computer after the January 1st backup had been overwritten.

Since you seem to be concerned about restoring back to a certain time...maybe a more efficient way of backing things up...is simply backing up the important items...such as files (created from apps such as MS Office, Adobe, etc.), photos, music, videos, etc.

These are the things that you REALLY don't want to lose. The OS & apps can be reinstalled...the things I mentioned above can't if they are lost (no backups).

- Nick