Time machine is great for this. Backup your hard disk with time machine and during OSX installation you can tell it to restore from a Time Machine backup disk. Afterwards you will not even know you reinstalled as everything will “just work”.
Question. So if i delete things i dont want on it anymore and move songs another HDD etc and reinstall the OSX?
Will it make a big difference just using time machine, or would it be better to do a install and not use time machine and just slowly download things again?
Im looking for the best way to do a install without having files on the macbook i dont need?
Can i chose to drag only some things from time machine or not?
I know CCC and Super Duper are great applications but CCC failed me badly and Time Machine just did the job, no effing about and it restored a whole 470gig system in 4 hours.
You can back up with TM and then if you want you can just install OSX and restore parts of the Time Machine backup as you go along or the whole lot.
When your TM disk is connected you have the abiility to look back at your desktop at any date that you made a backup and restore a folder as it was from that date.
No-one will ever convince me to use anything else other than Time Machine unless it is Dr.Who and he gives me his Sonic Screwdriver.
Id restore the whole lot and then delete things you dont want off the internal drive.
It will take just as long to restore iTunes and Traktor than it will the whole system.
My only issue was that i Restored iTunes and Traktor. Traktor was not reading the iTunes collection properly due to path changes so i restored the whole system and then deleted anything i didnt want from the new hard drive knowing that it is still on my Time Machine backup.
Keep in mind that things which aren’t on your system for very long don’t tend to last very long in the Time Machine backups either…
The hourly backups get consolidated down to one daily backup (i.e. only one of those hourlies is kept). The daily backups will go down to weekly and then monthly.
So (assuming you’re letting it back up regularly) if something has been on your system for less than a day when you delete it, it might not be backed up for very long at all. Less than a week will last longer, etc.
True.
I dont do TM backups so often. Once a week probably at the most.
What i do do though is Export my iTunes XML and my Traktor Collection to my iDisk ebery day.
How do you set up time machine so it only backs up like that and not every hour? i think i would prefer to just do one a week as i think every hour is a little pointless for myself, and also you say idisk is that mobileme ?
I don’t think you can alter how often time machine backs up automatically.
What you can do though, is go in to the Time Machine control panel & switch it off altogether. Then just switch it back on once a week or so, when you want to back up.
(this is presuming you’re backing up wirelessly to a Time Capsule or similar. If you’ve got a USB drive you use for time machine, just plug it in once a week when you want to back up)
I tend to leave time Machine switched off on my Gigging lappy when i’m DJing. As presumably it’s another background process that can be eliminated to make things run smoother during a gig.
iDisk is a part of MobileMe which is very handy. I have a folder that i share with my DJ buddy and we swap itunes and Traktor playlists. Its not that quick if you are transfering large files but it syncs automatically so its pretty groovy.
This is exactly what im hoping to achieve with everyones help..
I have my Itunes library which is 100GB for example, When i go to copy over the music folder which has everything in it… I notice that i have a Extra 10GB in there. Im thinking this is from me not putting duplicates and old files into the trash..
If i copy over this folder with out changing it, will this copy over the library how it is now or with the extra 10GB in it?
Secondly I was hoping of backing this up somewhere in folders which is by album so i can click onto it and add it to itunes if needed but just have it on my itunes. If i drag the songs themselves and put them into folders i make then put on a portable HDD, once i drop them back in will they de displayed as there use to be in the iTunes library as they have the information written into them?
