How To Transfer Time Machine Backup to New Drive

Ran Disk Repair twice. Tons of errors the first time. Second and third clean.
Tried the restore and got the same message - Could not validate source - Bad file descriptor

If I deselect the Erase destination box it seems to go forward (Estimating time for transfer).
I'll let it run overnight and see what happens.

Any further thoughts would be most welcome.

Benny B wrote:
Ran Disk Repair twice. Tons of errors the first time. Second and third clean.

Not a good sign. There may be other problems DU can't find.

Tried the restore and got the same message - Could not validate source - Bad file descriptor

If I deselect the Erase destination box it seems to go forward (Estimating time for transfer).

That's probably not going to work. On Leopard, anyway, it wouldn't. You had to erase the destination's entire directory structure so the backups would be copied properly. You may be the one to find out whether that's changed in SL.

You're putting a lot of effort into this, for what should be just backups. I do hope you haven't been deleting originals, on the assumption that TM will keep it's copies indefinitely?

No, I got an Operation Not Permitted error

My plan was to move TM to a newer larger drive and them use the older one for SuperDuper bootable clone as a further backup.

I may just fire up the new drive as a clean TM drive and save the old TM drive as a backup. If an older version of a document is important, I have it elsewhere also. This is going to be a common occurrence now that TM has been around for a while. Unless mine is just a bad hard drive problem.

Any other ideas? I appreciate someone taking the time to help answer my questions.

Benny B wrote:
No, I got an Operation Not Permitted error

My plan was to move TM to a newer larger drive and them use the older one for SuperDuper bootable clone as a further backup.

Good plan.

I may just fire up the new drive as a clean TM drive and save the old TM drive as a backup. If an older version of a document is important, I have it elsewhere also. This is going to be a common occurrence now that TM has been around for a while. Unless mine is just a bad hard drive problem.

Any other ideas? I appreciate someone taking the time to help answer my questions.

If you have +Disk Warrior 4.2+ (you can update for free from an earlier version), that might be able to find and fix more things on the old drive. I'd certainly not spend the $100 to get it just for that slim possibility, however.

Since you're on Snow Leopard, if you don't mind the time, you might try copying the entire Backups.backupdb folder via the Finder. This does not work on Leopard, but does work on SL. It will take quite a while, of course, and if there's corruption left on them, it may fail or copy the corruption (which is worse?).

I'm more than willing to try.

Now when I try to copy via Finder I get

"The backup can’t be copied because the backup volume doesn’t have ownership enabled."

Does that refer to the new drive or the old one (the backup volume)? The old TM disk shows it is locked in the Get Info...

Benny B wrote:
I'm more than willing to try.

Now when I try to copy via Finder I get

"The backup can’t be copied because the backup volume doesn’t have ownership enabled."

Does that refer to the new drive or the old one (the backup volume)? The old TM disk shows it is locked in the Get Info...

That whole thing has never made much sense to me. I'd guess it's the new one. You can change (either) by clicking the padlock, entering your Admin password, then making whatever changes you want. You may need to click the little "gear" icon to get the right options.

Ok, this is my story so far. I have got two external drived plugged into an Airport Extreme, one 300GB acting as a Time Machine Drive for my PPC G4 Mac Mini and a 500GB Time Machine drive for my White MacBook.
The Mac Mini drive was full and the MacBook drive had a bit of space but thought it was time to upgrade. I bought a 2TB WD MyBook and partitioned it as two 1TB drives, one for the MacMini and one for the MacBook.

I have tried all sorts to get the 300GB .sparsebundle file to the 1TB partition for the MacMini, however when I did the .sparsebundle file would not resize, Time Machine still insisted it was full. I tried the resize option in Disk Utility but this did not seem to work. In the end, I reformatted the 1TB partition and started my MacMini backup from scratch. I generally have a policy of not deleting anything so hopefully should not have anything missing. Most important thing for me is to have a working backup.

I am now working on transfering the MacBook backup, I may have the same problems, but this time both drives are GUID formatted, the old 300GB drive was APT formatted. I am hopeing this is what prevented the MacMini backup from being copied over and that the MacBook backup drive will restore over to the new drive without any problem. Just need to wait 8 or 9 hours to find out. I will report back.

Just an update and a question.

My old TM drive spent the last 24 hours changing permissions and then was able to copy over the Backups.backupdb folder via Finder. It still has 25 minutes to go. Is this the only folder that need to be copied for the new drive to be used as a TM drive and still have the old data?

Benny B wrote:
Just an update and a question.

My old TM drive spent the last 24 hours changing permissions and then was able to copy over the Backups.backupdb folder via Finder. It still has 25 minutes to go. Is this the only folder that need to be copied for the new drive to be used as a TM drive and still have the old data?

Yes. Just select the proper drive via TM Preferences > Options and you should be good to go.

Sure enough it works. But only back to May 2009. I looked at my wife's iMac and hers is also back to May 2009. I know I've been using TM much longer than her. Ideas on that?

Also, in the worst case scenario that some of the old data is corrupted, after this first TM update on the new drive, will the computer be restorable to today's state regardless of the old data or do I need to tell it to do a full backup (if I even can)? It is going through a lengthy "Calculating Changes" grind right now (only at 13%).

Again, many thanks for the help.

And now a Erase, check the old drive and SuperDuper clone to keep at work. Can't be too safe.

Benny B wrote:
Sure enough it works. But only back to May 2009. I looked at my wife's iMac and hers is also back to May 2009. I know I've been using TM much longer than her. Ideas on that?

Was the drive near full? If so, TM most likely deleted your oldest backups to make room for new ones. If not, you may be able to use #17 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip* to see the earlier ones.

Also, in the worst case scenario that some of the old data is corrupted,

That's doubtful. If it could be copied, it's not likely to be corrupted. (There may be "abandoned" files taking up space that won't be re-used, but that doesn't affect the backups.)

after this first TM update on the new drive, will the computer be restorable to today's state regardless of the old data

It should be. The "calculating changes" is no doubt doing a "deep traversal," comparing every folder on your system to the backups, to see what's changed and needs to be backed-up. So once this backup is done, it should be a complete "snapshot" of your entire system.

If you haven't yet, Click here to download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window. And see #7 in the FAQ Tip for info on the normal messages it sends.

do I need to tell it to do a full backup (if I even can)?

No. The only way you can make it actually copy everything now on your system is to rename your internal hard drive (but even that doesn't always do it).

ok, latest update.

However I copy the .sparsebundle file over to my new larger drive, the .sparsebundle file is still fixed at the old drive size and as a result I am not getting any benefit from upgrading to a larger hard drive. Can anyone tell me how to resize the .sparsebundle image files to take advantage of my larger hard drives. Thank you.

KeithEllis wrote:
ok, latest update.

However I copy the .sparsebundle file over to my new larger drive, the .sparsebundle file is still fixed at the old drive size and as a result I am not getting any benefit from upgrading to a larger hard drive. Can anyone tell me how to resize the .sparsebundle image files to take advantage of my larger hard drives. Thank you.

Try this: when you select +Images > Resize,+ click the triangle to the left of the Cancel button, and select the +Resize Image Only+ button. (Everything in this process takes a while to register, for some reason).

I tried doing this from one external drive to another and got the message "The operation can't be completed because it isn't supported." Ownership is enabled on both drives and I'm logged into an administrator account. I'm using 10.6.1, 64-bit mode.

I have to copy my TM backup folder to another drive because the current drive became corrupted (pwerfailure? TM failure? external drive case failure?) and the drive is now read only. I have successfully copied other directories from it.

Thoughts on why Finder displays this error?

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin H C Monahan wrote:
. . .
I have to copy my TM backup folder to another drive because the current drive became corrupted (pwerfailure? TM failure? external drive case failure?) and the drive is now read only. I have successfully copied other directories from it.

Thoughts on why Finder displays this error?

Try +*Repair Disk+* (not permissions) on it. If that doesn't work, and you already have +Disk Warrior 4.2,+ it might be able to fix the backups, but I wouldn't spend the $100 on the chance -- they probably can't be copied because they're corrupted.