New forum member and hopefully a simple question!

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Hello my name is Paul and I have been a Mac owner for 6 years. I have an iMac and a MacBook and yesterday purchased a reconditioned second hand macbook. All machines have snow leopard on them. I have a time machine that is used to back up both the iMac and the Mac book.

The seller of the reco MacBook said to copy the time machine onto an external hard drive which I have but haven't set it up yet.

Then he said to connect the external hard drive to the reco MacBook and the do something to replicate the existing MacBook backup onto the reco machine.

I am not too savvy about these things and searched on the forum but only seemed to find topics discussing the relative merits of backing up time capsules rather than using this as an approach to set up a new MacBook. Hope someone can help and look forward to being part of this quality forum!
 
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Your Mac's Specs
21" iMac * 2.8 Ghz Intel Core i7 * 16GB 1333 Mhz DDR3 * 1TB HD *AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB
Mac Basics: Time Machine

Basically, you just connect your drive with the Time Machine backup on it to your new Mac before you turn it on for the first time and at some point in the setup process it will ask if you want to restore from a Time Machine backup. Just choose the most recent backup and it will start transferring from there.
 
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Thank you for the response. Couple of points. I have an external hard drive but don't know how to set it up or initialize it. I guess I need to connect it again to set it up?

Then what? How do I back up or copy the time capsule? Is that the best way?

And the new reco machine has already been switched on. Will that matter? Why can't I just connect the new machine directly to the TC and reinstate the od machines backups directly onto the new reco machine?
 
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Your Mac's Specs
21" iMac * 2.8 Ghz Intel Core i7 * 16GB 1333 Mhz DDR3 * 1TB HD *AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB
When you plug it in for the first time, Time Machine will detect it if it's properly formatted and ask if you'd like to use it for your backups. You can also click on the Apple menu and choose System Preferences; near the bottom is the Time Machine Preferences option. There you can choose which of your connected drives you'd like to use for backups.

If your drive is not detected using either of these two methods, it may need to be formatted. To do this, look in Applications>Utilities>Disk Utilities. When it opens up, you'll see a list of connected drives in the left hand pane. Select the drive you want to use on the left, then click on Erase. From the drop down menu choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled), then click Erase. This should format it correctly and you should be able to choose the drive in TM Preferences.

At any rate, once you select the drive, you'll have the option to exclude any files you won't want backed up. Tick the box that says "Show Time Machine in Menu Bar". Now the TM icon is in the upper right side of the menu bar up top. Click on that and choose "BackUp Now". Depending on how much stuff you have, it may take several hours.

Time Capsule is something different. It's a wireless backup drive/wireless router that Time Machine, which is the actual program, can backup to.
 

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