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[birdmantd]

The Main Time Machine Backups of External Drives When Changing Macs

Tags: Mac

I have been running an M1 iMac with a 4TB external SSD being used as direct access storage, and I use Time Machine to back up that external SSD to two external 5TB HDDs once a month. I don’t even backup the Mac’s internal SSD, just the external SSD where I keep all my data.

I am switching now to a 16″ MacBook Pro (M1 Pro) and am wondering

Is it possible for my MB Pro to pick up where my iMac left off with the TM backups? Or do I need to wipe the two HDD backup drives and re-initiate the TM backups of the 4TB SSD through TM on the new MacBook? It would stink if every time you bought a new Mac, you had re-do several TBs of backups like this.

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• This topic was modified 3 weeks, 3 days ago by birdmantd.

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This may work

In reply to The Main Time Machine Backups of External Drives When Changing Macs

Make a backup of your old Mac, just the Mac, nothing external.
Setup up your new Mac and when it asks if you want to restore from somewhere, answer yes and plug in the newly created TM backup.
Once restored, I believe all the preferences that you had on the original machine, were transferred to the new machine, including TM information.

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