Q: Has anyone actually successfully managed to move your TimeMachine backups to a new, bigger drive?
Over the years, TimeMachine has been an endless source of frustration. In short - my goal is to retain my backup history by copying my TimeMachine backups to a new, larger hard drive that will then become my TM backup moving forward.
I have tried every approach recommended by Apple...namely:
1. The official runbook for this process (located here: Time Machine: How to transfer backups from a current backup drive to a new backup drive - Apple Support) which literally never works. The error I get all the time is something about being unable to convert and needing a new version of iWork?!!! Whatever.
2. Disk Utility > Restore to a new destination (block by block copy)...here I run into 2 errors (both totally useless and unhelpful). Either I get "Could not restore - Input/output error" or I get "/sbin/newfs_hfs failed with error 256" and "Could not restore - Device not configured".
I have literally tried this on and off for years with various hardware, drives etc. I have never once gotten a successful TM backup (that wasn't trivial in size) to be copied over to a new drive. I always end up tossing my backup history and starting from scratch with a new drive and that, of course, completely defeats the purpose.
Can anyone else from the community let me know if you've had more success and, if so, exactly how you did it? This would seem to be 1 of the MOST obvious and common things someone would want to do - it's incredibly to me that it's this frustrating just to move a set of backups.
TimeMachine, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3), TimeMachine
Posted on May 16, 2015 5:55 PM