Finder never finishes copying Time Machine backup to different drive
This is NOT the "Time Machine gets stuck preparing backup" issue. I'm trying to transfer a Time Machine Backups.backupdb folder to another volume, and the Finder never finishes. It keeps copying more and more data until the destination drive is full, and if anyone else is having this problem, I can't find the search terms to get a fix. Here are the details.
I'd been backing up my Mac Pro to the same Time Machine volume as my Mack Book Air. I didn't know Time Machine wasn't supposed to be able to backup more than one Mac per volume. The MBA was first, so the .sparsebundle file at the root level of the volume is its backup, and Time Machine created a Backups.backupdb folder for the Mac Pro. It's been working fine, but now I'm out of room and want to stop the dialog that asks me if I want to keep the backups separate every time I start one, so I'm trying to copy the Backups.backupdb to another drive and get it set up properly.
I followed the instructions on the support page. I turned off Time Machine, turned off "Ignore ownership on this volume" on the destination volume, and dragged the folder over to the new drive. It copied for hours and just kept growing until the whole destination drive was full.
Both backups are now together on one 700GB partition. I can't tell the exact size of the Backups.backupdb because if I get info on the folder, it will say it's calculating the size forever, but the .sparsebundle on the same partition is 409 GB and there's just under 8 GB free, so it's about 283 GB. I tried to copy it to a volume with over 500 GB free space. It prepares to copy, asks me to authenticate, begins to copy, and behaves normally with the file count and estimated time remaining moving along as expected with the progress bar. It even calculates the size properly. But, when it gets down to "Copying 0 items to …" and the estimated time left is "About 5 seconds" it just keeps going and the size keeps growing. Last night I let it run until it completely filled the destination volume, and only about half of the folders were inside the Backups.backupdb on the destination volume.
I tried it again tonight on a different 1 TB partition. It's doing the same thing. It started at 247 GB and change and copied just fine until it gets to 0 files. The status is now at 314.42 GB of 314.42 GB and they both keep going up together. There's no way the folder is actually that large, so I'm assuming it's following a soft link somewhere and it's creating a loop.
I am wondering if the cp command set to not follow symbolic links will copy everything over with the proper permissions and other resources needed for Time Machine to use the backup. Or does Apple have a different command line utility that will work better for this?
I've thought of creating an archive of it and expanding it to the destination. I'm assuming Keka would handle the job, but I'm hoping there's a solution that won't take hours of experimenting and testing.
Or could it be the Mojave Finder? I have Yosemite on the Mac Book Air, but getting that into the loop and experimenting will take hours. I'd really love to find out what the problem is instead of just finding another workaround.
Thanks in advance for your help. It's greatly appreciated!!!
Mac Pro, macOS 10.14