I am not paranoid. I have Time Machine backups all over the place. I have one on a USB-C drive that I need to repartition. I need to archive the Time Machine backup to an image file on another external drive, rework the partition map on the drive and then move the archive back from the image to the original drive. What is the best way to go about this?
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 11.0
Timothy Stringer wrote:
What is the best way to go about this?
Not starting? If you have other backups, just wipe the drive and move on.
If there are critically important things on this backup, then you need to re-evaluate how you are using Time Machine. It isn’t good for archives. It is great for backups. But if you want to archive data, use something else.
You may be able to create an image of the drive using Disk Utility. If you make sure to unmount the volumes in Disk Utility, then you can select the container drive itself and make an image from that. Then you can use Disk Utility to restore it. The key part is that must do this from Disk Utility using unmounted volumes. This does a low-level block-wise copy. There is nothing else that can be done with a Time Machine volume.
Also, you have to accept the backup and restore simply might not work. You won’t know until you try and if it fails, your data is gone forever. Therefore, you might want to revisit my advice above. If you know exactly what these critical files are, move them to a true archive drive right now, while you still can. Then just wipe the drive.
Archive a Time Machine Backup
