I Turn Off Time Machine Before Smart Update--Necessary or Not?

[sjk]

Originally Posted by dnanian

you could always disconnect the Time Machine volume to ensure that it doesn't back up when started up from the copy...

Kind of hard to do if the TM volume happens to be on an internal drive (e.g. in a Mac Pro).

I consistently get a "can't find valid TM volume" error (something like that), or TM isn't yet scheduled to run, right after restarting my Mac mini with an external drive connected that contains a TM volume. Always gives me enough time to manually unmount it if I don't want it online.