You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

ElRay2676 Author

Level 1

16 points

Can I Transfer old Time Machine Backups to a New Drive?

I have several OLD hard drives with Time Machine backups on them. I also have a new, much larger, RAID5 drive. What I'd like to do it to archive the old Time Machine Back-ups to the new drive, before the old drives finally die.

I do not have any expectation of merging the back-ups, I just want to copy the old "ComputerName" folders in the various Backups.backupdb folders into the new "master" Backups.backupdb. Also, I may need to rename one of the old "ComputerName" sub-folders.

If that is a no-go, can I just restore the latest version of every backed-up file/folder to a sub-folder on the new drive, so the files aren't lost?

Mac mini, macOS 11.0

Posted on Dec 9, 2020 9:57 AM

Top-ranking reply

Tesserax

Level 10

152,768 points

Posted on Dec 9, 2020 10:16 AM

This should be possible. See the following article on the details:

Time Machine: How to transfer backups from a current backup drive to a new backup drive - Apple Support

View in context

Can I Transfer old Time Machine Backups to a New Drive?

Similar questions