Can I add data from new hard drive to an external hard drive?

[treehouse555]

Hello again MacFurum gurus!

I have a Macbook Pro 8,2 (late 2011), running Yosemite OS. I recently replaced my internal hard drive, and decided to start fresh, and not resurrect any old data from my external hard drive (2TB Western Digital).

It's time to back-up data from the new hard drive to the existing external hard drive. What's the best way to do this? Could I simply add to back-ups that are from my old hard drive?

 

[pm-r]

It depends on what and how you're doing your backup.

Also you could could partition the external and leave you old stuff in one and thee new backup in another. Or create an archive assuming you want to keep everything and I don't know what you might have duplicated.

Be aware that CCC and SD if you're using them for the backup have an option to erase anything on the backup volume before any backup you may want to disable if you leave the drive as a single volume.

CCC also has an option to create an archive of any existing data.

Read the directions carefully!!!





- Patrick
======

 

[treehouse555]

Thanks Patrick. Your ideas are vaguely familiar, but I'm kind of a newbie, in terms of partitioning, and what is CCC and SD? Should I just go online to Western Digital and find a manual there?

 

[pm-r]

CCC = Carbon Copy Cloner
SD = SuperDuper!

Both very popular backup/cloning applications.

I and some other tend to favor CCC, but your choice.

For various methods, I'd suggest reading some of the excellent info available at Bombich's CCC's site:
https://bombich.com

Partitioning is done with Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. Read its Help from the Help menu or go googling. The WD site will tell you the same thing I'm sure.



- Patrick
======

 

[KevinJS]

I'm not familiar with the way backups are written to disk, but if they are a single file the file extension could be changed (perhaps to .old). This would prevent them from being overwritten by new backups.

 

[pm-r]

I'm not familiar with the way backups are written to disk, but if they are a single file the file extension could be changed (perhaps to .old). This would prevent them from being overwritten by new backups.

Not as far as CCC is concerned if its been told to wipe anything that shouldn't be there. Poof, gone, even if it was "invisible", name or extension change wouldn't change anything!!! Instantly gone without even a tiny blink!!!

 

[KevinJS]

Not as far as CCC is concerned if its been told to wipe anything that shouldn't be there. Poof, gone, even if it was "invisible", name or extension change wouldn't change anything!!! Instantly gone without even a tiny blink!!!

Yikes. Pays to be sure you know what you're doing then.

 

[chscag]

CCC will issue a warning before it over writes a first time drive that it's about to create a clone on. Unless someone ignores the warning there should be no problem.

 

[pm-r]

CCC will issue a warning before it over writes a first time drive that it's about to create a clone on. Unless someone ignores the warning there should be no problem.

Good to know, and I've never tried to test that option or really wanted to.

 

[lclev]

Did we ever establish how treehouse555 created the original backup of the old data? Was it a Time Machine backup or just a copying of data to the WD drive? This would make a difference to what is recommended.

I don't think CCC or SD was used as the OP does not seem to have heard of them.

It would be helpful to know how the original data was backed up.

Lisa

 

[sailor#1]

You might consider using the time machine to backup all data. Spend $130 on a new WD 4GB external HDD. Then unpack everything that is previously backed up, and put it on the new drive using time machine. Then switch the settings in time machine to allow your overall system to use the new 4GB HDD as the full backup to combine everything. You can think of various other options for also using the existing 2GB drive which you can now erase. If you're strapped, than a smaller, 2GB WD HDD would only cost $70-80. You could then combine the two using OS software raid to expand the data size to 4GB.

You might also consider replacing the original internal HD with a hybrid as large as you can afford, at least up to 1GB. This would add both space and speed. I did that with my 2011 MBP and it works great. I have a single WD 4GB external drive as a time machine on that.

Good luck.