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External Hard Drive questions, help needed (for Mac)

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TechnoPotamus
Posts: 11626 - Karma: 3,522
Hey guys,

So my macbook is on it's way out, and I know it's about that time to start backing things up in case it goes down for good one of these days.

I had an external hard drive before that I was using but here's the problem, with that stupid piece of shit app Time Machine, it backed up my stuff over and over until it couldn't handle anymore, and it won't let me access or delete the old backups.

So, here's my question and where I need your expertise: What kind of external hard drive for a mac can I get, and essentially use it like a giant USB stick - as in just dragging and dropping files and folders from my macbook hard drive to the external hard drive?

There has to be a way to do this without letting Time Machine kick in and fuck it up. I only need 100GB in terms of size.


Thank you in advance for your help!


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Jun 6 2013 9:54AM
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a_pla5tic_bag
Posts: 9217 - Karma: 5,399
why can't you access the drive you have? you can't open it and just delete everything on it? plug the drive in and use disk utility to wipe the external. then either use time machine cause it'll restore any new mac to exactly the way your old one was or selectively copy files from your computer to the drive.

any hd should work, drives shouldn't be mac specific as far as im aware.
Jun 6 2013 10:13AM
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TechnoPotamus
Posts: 11626 - Karma: 3,522
I should have preceded this with the fact that I am not extremely computer savvy. Somewhat, but not great.

I will look into using disk utility to do it, I just don't know how but I'm sure google can help me out with that.


To answer your question: whenever I plug the external hard drive into my computer, it starts up Time Machine automatically. What I'm looking for is for it to not activate Time Machine at all so that I can just access everything in the drive in a new Finder window, just like you would with a small USB stick. Probably due to my lack of knowledge around Time Machine, I can't figure out how to access the old Time Machine Backups and delete them. It's a maddening problem because I have what I think must be a perfectly good external hard drive, that is of no use to me right now because I can't access it or delete files from it. And I don't want to buy a new one until I can figure out how to make sure a new one won't just end up getting taken over by Time Machine in the same manner.
Jun 6 2013 10:24AM
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TechnoPotamus
Posts: 11626 - Karma: 3,522
first, +K to you man. 10/10


I feel really dumb now, but honestly I had never even seen the Disk Utility application or knew what it did. I opened it up and boom, there's the external and the backups. Erased both completely, and I'm not copying my entire iTunes library (the main issue this was about) to the external now.

Looks like it will take around 45 minutes but I'll report back. I think it's going to work, and this is exactly what I was trying to do so THANK YOU SO MUCH
Jun 6 2013 10:36AM
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a_pla5tic_bag
Posts: 9217 - Karma: 5,399
yeah time machine and it's system is pretty nice cause it does restore to exactly the way it was. You can make it so that when you plug a drive in, it doesn't back up right away. Or when it does, go to system preferences> time machine > and you can see a little x to stop the backup.

seems like a lot of utility stuff is a bit hidden on osx.
Jun 6 2013 12:58PM
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HungryHypocrite
Posts: 765 - Karma: 939
in what sense is your mac going? I recently removed an estimate of 3tonnes from my computers ventilators and now it works like a charm
Jun 6 2013 1:29PM
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TechnoPotamus
Posts: 11626 - Karma: 3,522
1.) it definitely worked just as I had hoped, so big thanks to A_pla5tic_bag. Such a simple fix. I turned off time machine so that it won't do that shit any longer.


And the only real problem, is that my mouse has become hypersensitive and will jump all over the screen and select things at random. I believe that it's because the click button on the mousepad has loosened up over time and just started to go (it's almost 6 years old now). It's not a huge issue, but when doing word processing and spreadsheet work it really can become a pain in the ass since it will click on various parts of the page or suddenly select entire pieces of information and delete them upon striking the next key
Jun 6 2013 2:11PM
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mmallender.
Posts: 5805 - Karma: 936
you can also go into the get info and change the file types and read/write permissions to delete individual backup files rather than using disk utility to delete everything off your harddrive.

also, time machine is a rather effective backup method for preserving states of your computer. it does one major full computer backup, and then the additional backups are based on file changes outside of your original full backup
Jun 6 2013 2:23PM
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7springsprod
Posts: 2661 - Karma: 3,181
But I thought macs never die.
Jun 6 2013 2:26PM
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TechnoPotamus
Posts: 11626 - Karma: 3,522
Time Machine does a great job of backing up you're entire computer, no doubt about it.

My issue was that I don't need my whole computer backed up, only selected important items like my music library, digital family pictures, and my resume and work documents. Since my Time Machine had backed up so many iterations of changed states of my computer (years worth) it couldn't do it any longer and wouldn't let me delete old backups, so it was permanently stuck in a state that it was in years ago, which wasn't of much use to me at this point. ya know?
Jun 6 2013 2:32PM
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mmallender.
Posts: 5805 - Karma: 936
definitely understand. you can selectively backup/exclude items from the backups for the future, just a time consuming process at the start haha.

i know exactly what youve been dealing with though, i have two external harddrives and both of them have time machine backups spanning the past 5 years of my mbp's life, i need to get rid of at least some of it, but at the same time, theres shit in my older backups that i need to go through and keep.
Jun 6 2013 2:57PM
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Darth.Maul
Posts: 2472 - Karma: 652
Have you considered a wireless laptop mouse? It wont work in class but for deskwork it sure saves a lot of time over using a trackpad!


Jun 6 2013 8:14PM
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TechnoPotamus
Posts: 11626 - Karma: 3,522
I have! It's a great idea. I was going to get the wireless keyboard and mouse from apple but apparently my computer is one generation too old so it's not compatible. I'm sure I could get one from logitech or something but if I'm going to do all of that stuff I'd rather just put the money towards a new computer. It's not a debilitating thing or anything, just a minor annoyance
Jun 6 2013 10:03PM
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mode2n
Posts: 2856 - Karma: 256
I'm currently doing th exact same thing, switching over from my 5 year old Macbook to a pro. I bought a Seagate Backup Plus external drive, and it works exactly like your looking for an external to work. Super easy to work with, and generally created for Macs. Check it out, it may be what your going for here
Jun 6 2013 10:29PM
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E__
Posts: 5751 - Karma: 4,635
I bought a Seagate and hooked it up with time machine and it worked for maybe a week. Now, like a year later it finally starts showing me a message that it's broken and I can't access anything.
Jun 6 2013 10:34PM
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howlongcanausern
Posts: 4982 - Karma: 1,737
shoulda bought a mac they just work /thread
Jun 6 2013 10:36PM
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mode2n
Posts: 2856 - Karma: 256
Well I hope that's not the case with mine. I didn't use time machine on it, so maybe that will make some sort of minor difference. Good to hear other's experiences with the product
Jun 6 2013 11:49PM
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TechnoPotamus
Posts: 11626 - Karma: 3,522
that was basically my experience, except I have a Maxtor external HD.

opening Disk Utility, and deleting not only the Time Machine Backups, but also the entire External HD as well, fixed the issue and made the external HD usable again for me. I assumed for literally 2 years it was broken but kept it anyway...now i'm glad that I did
Jun 7 2013 8:57AM
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volvotom
Posts: 2045 - Karma: 712
How big are your internal/external HDDs?

I have 5 years of back-ups of my 250gb on my 1TB and still have some extra space.
Jun 7 2013 2:43PM
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TechnoPotamus
Posts: 11626 - Karma: 3,522
internal on this one (the black MacBook from awhile back) is 200GB. the external I have from Maxtor, is 150GB.


I think I probably had the settings such that Time Machine was backing up it every single week, for a couple years straight, so it didn't take very long to overload it due to the frequency of creating another full backup each week while keeping the old ones.
Jun 7 2013 5:29PM
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NEIL-YOUNG
Posts: 317 - Karma: 423
plug in your dick to the usb port
Jun 7 2013 5:51PM
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TechnoPotamus
Posts: 11626 - Karma: 3,522
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Jun 7 2013 6:13PM
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E__
Posts: 5751 - Karma: 4,635
Ok sweet I'll give it a go.
Jun 7 2013 6:51PM
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