Yosemite and backup drive

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Tried to install Yosemite yesterday.
It insists that Macintosh HD is used by Time Machine as my backup drive. It is not. Thus, install was a big fail.

I looked around on the web for various fixes, but either I did not trust what I was reading or it involved hours of my time, which don't seem worth the investment.

Is there a simple fix? Is this a known bug that will be fixed at some point?
 

chscag

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You didn't offer us any info to help you. However, it's not a bug... if you had your Time Machine drive removed from your Mac and left Time Machine on, it will continue to make backups and place them on your internal drive in your Mac instead of the Time Machine external drive. The Yosemite installer "sees" those backups and will refuse to install.

Mount your Time Machine drive, Make sure Time Machine is on, make a backup and that should clear your internal drive where you can then install Yosemite.
 
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I'm not sure what you really need to know, but for starters
Macbook pro, mid-2012, running 10.9.5 - what else?

My external drive is plugged in, and time machine is on. I even did an extra backup after I got the initial error message in hope of that clearing things up, and it did not. So I searched the web and learned about making coding changes through terminal, which I'm not tech savvy enough to feel comfortable doing, or doing a clean install, which looks like a huge time investment.

Hence, my wondering if this is a bug, or should I perhaps download a new copy of Yosemite and try again?

I really don't know what you need to know to help, so ask any pertinent questions.
 

chscag

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The error you experienced is a common error and is usually caused by Time Machine "Local Snapshots". I can't be 100% certain that's what causing your difficulty, but we have had other users complaining of the same exact error that you received and Time Machine Local Snapshots were the reason.

Read about Local Snapshots from Apple. Perhaps that will help you to sort it out. And thanks for the additional info.
 
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Thank you for your help. Unfortunately, I have not resolved this issue. What I have done was look into disabling local snapshots. I found an article on OSX Daily that gave instructions on how to do this; specifically, going in to Terminal and typing sudo tmutil disablelocal, then entering my password when prompted. This was several days ago. Since then I've done regular backups and have done restarts, and I still get the same message when I try to install Yosemite.

I will continue to work on this but any other insights would be greatly appreciated. Surely, I cannot be the only person with this issue?
 

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