New Mac, same external media drives, time machine backup?

[icrude]

Got a new Mac, never backed up my Mac, but used time machine on it to backup my external drives for my photography. Is there a way to use my new Mac to use time machine to continue the backups for my external drives or does it have to make a new backup for every drive because it’s hooked up to the new computer? I have terabytes of drives….that wouldn’t really make sense if I had to do that simply cause I got a new computer….?

 

[gilby101]

Do say what versions of macOS on both the old and the new Mac (edit: macOS 11.x since you have posted to this forum). And the format of the TM drive (hfs+ or apfs). I assume the names of the external drives are the same as before - is that right.

When you connect the TM disk to your new Mac, you may be lucky and macOS asks if you want to inherit the backup. If that doesn't happen, you may be able to use the Terminal command tmutil inheritbackup. But these things are always a bit tricky and are format and macOS version dependent. Risk is you lose the backup completely.

The safest way is to keep your old TM disk unused (incase you need to recover any old files) and to buy a new HDD for TM.

 

[icrude]

It would suck to have to buy new backup drives. I’m a photographer and I have 10+ media drives and 10+ backup drives. Just because I get a new computer I should have to buy 10+ new backup drives? That doesn’t make much sense.

 

[gilby101]

How do you configure Time Machine to use 10+ backup drives for 10+ media drives? That doesn't sound like Time Machine. Perhaps you can tell us more about your disk configuration.

 

[icrude]

I photograph a wedding and download that to an external drive….let’s call that media 1. Then I use time machine to backup that drive to another drive…media 1 backup. Then when media 1 is full, I buy a new drive, media 2, and start the whole process over again. It’s an easy way to have 2 copies of everything I shoot and everything is easy to backup when I plug it in. But when I get a new computer, it’s like whenever I plug in any of the drives, if I want to back it up it will have to make a whole new backup just cause the computer is new…

 

[gilby101]

As I said before you can make the new computer inherit the old backups. But I do think that process can be risky.

Using TM the way you describe is unusual and, I suggest, not how it is intended to to be used. TM is not suited to backup of drives which are only connected intermittently or to multiple different backup drives.

You might do better with a cloning tool (e.g. Carbon Copy Cloner or Chronosync) with separate jobs for each of your pairs of media and backup drives. But, of course, that also means starting again with backup.

 

[mikzn]

After reading the above posts - (just my 2 cents) you might be better off using a back program like CCC as gilby101 suggests

I have over 20 years of photos / pictures and keep 2 separate weekly back ups of my photos using CCC (Saturday and Wednesday) - very easy to configure weekly scripts for the back ups and can be backed up by "drive" or "by folder" (I prefer folder back up for Music and Photos files) and also keep separately a complete back up clone of the Mac

 

[Jumpie]

Kind of the same for me, I think. I had an old MBP and had an external drive for TM backups. It was backed up using Big Sur beta. Bought a new MBP M1 an set it up as new since the internal HD was only 500GB instead of 1TB. I wanted to use the old TM backup and pull some data from it. When I tried after a while, it came back and said there's an error. I don't remember the exact wording though. I just want to use it to pull some of the files from the backup and not necessarily sync back to it. Can't this be done?