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Switcher Hangout (Windows to Mac)
Some questions on how to manage my MacBook Pro and ICY BOX Portable Hard Disk Drive
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<blockquote data-quote="MacInWin" data-source="post: 1790053" data-attributes="member: 396914"><p>Whether or not you clean out the old drive first is up to you. Deleting lots of stuff is, to me, a bit risky, so I tend to make backups BEFORE I do that, just in case I get overzealous in trashing stuff. But if you are certain you don't want what you are deleting, you don't have to make a backup first. It's up to you.</p><p></p><p>Normally a copy of the internal drive will NOT have any of the external drive data on it. Normally, all it will have is what's on the internal drive.</p><p></p><p>As for drives, just about any drive will do, there are only 3 manufacturers of drives now. What is most important is the speed of the interface and that it fits your Mac. Your system has USB3 ports, so a good drive with USB3 support will do. Don't worry about the format of the drive, you can get any drive and use Disk Utility to format it for the Mac. Mac stores tend to charge more because the drive is formatted for Mac, but you don't need that because you can do it yourself for free.</p><p></p><p>Once formatted, make a new backup of the MBP to the new drive. When that is done, you can get rid of whatever you want on the internal drive safely, knowing it's in the backup. </p><p></p><p>As for the old external, you said:Reading between the lines, it sounds like you tried to drag and drop something from the internal drive into a Time Machine backup, which is a real no-no. TM backups only LOOK like real files, they are actually hard links to the last time the files changed. In fact, for folders, they link to the last time anything in the folder changed. So trying to manipulate TM backups through Finder or Finder actions will destroy the integrity of the backup links. That's why you got the "operation cannot be completed" message. To deal with TM backups you must use Time Machine. Now, given that the new external has a new backup on it, you can decide if you want to keep those old backups or not. If not, and if there is nothing else on the old external drive, you can just reformat the drive and it will be new and empty. IF there are other files outside the backups on the drive, then you can look at the drive and delete the backups.backupdb folder. That will eliminate all of your backups on that drive. There is no recovery from that action, so make sure you really want to do it. Once the folder is gone, empty trash (it could take a while) and the drive will be ready for whatever you want to put on it.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="MacInWin, post: 1790053, member: 396914"] Whether or not you clean out the old drive first is up to you. Deleting lots of stuff is, to me, a bit risky, so I tend to make backups BEFORE I do that, just in case I get overzealous in trashing stuff. But if you are certain you don't want what you are deleting, you don't have to make a backup first. It's up to you. Normally a copy of the internal drive will NOT have any of the external drive data on it. Normally, all it will have is what's on the internal drive. As for drives, just about any drive will do, there are only 3 manufacturers of drives now. What is most important is the speed of the interface and that it fits your Mac. Your system has USB3 ports, so a good drive with USB3 support will do. Don't worry about the format of the drive, you can get any drive and use Disk Utility to format it for the Mac. Mac stores tend to charge more because the drive is formatted for Mac, but you don't need that because you can do it yourself for free. Once formatted, make a new backup of the MBP to the new drive. When that is done, you can get rid of whatever you want on the internal drive safely, knowing it's in the backup. As for the old external, you said:Reading between the lines, it sounds like you tried to drag and drop something from the internal drive into a Time Machine backup, which is a real no-no. TM backups only LOOK like real files, they are actually hard links to the last time the files changed. In fact, for folders, they link to the last time anything in the folder changed. So trying to manipulate TM backups through Finder or Finder actions will destroy the integrity of the backup links. That's why you got the "operation cannot be completed" message. To deal with TM backups you must use Time Machine. Now, given that the new external has a new backup on it, you can decide if you want to keep those old backups or not. If not, and if there is nothing else on the old external drive, you can just reformat the drive and it will be new and empty. IF there are other files outside the backups on the drive, then you can look at the drive and delete the backups.backupdb folder. That will eliminate all of your backups on that drive. There is no recovery from that action, so make sure you really want to do it. Once the folder is gone, empty trash (it could take a while) and the drive will be ready for whatever you want to put on it. [/QUOTE]
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Switcher Hangout (Windows to Mac)
Some questions on how to manage my MacBook Pro and ICY BOX Portable Hard Disk Drive
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