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krenders Author

Level 1

27 points

How clone a Time Machine backup APFS volume?

I have a three months old external LaCie D2 Professional drive with two volumes, one being a TM. I installed it just after having installed Big Sur at the time. I never had any issues with Catalina and an older drive but this combination seems to be causing problems.

Whenever it is mounted it is constantly spinning (literally for hours). Culprit looks to be a lot of mdworker processes. Unmounting the TM volume resolves the situation but of course that is not a solution. I am starting to fear it will get worn out. The LaCie drive seems to be ok, it has the latest firmware driver. Unless there is something wrong with the drive it self (Disk Utility's First Aid tool says there are issues with the drive but Disk Utility in Recovery mode says the drive is ok) I wonder if this is just one more problem introduced by Big Sur which seems to be the worst upgrade in years...

I would like to restore the drive from scratch but need to get the TM backups over to another drive. How can this be done? I tried to drag/drop but that doesn't work. The restore and image features in Disk Utility error. So I am a bit at a loss and am not doing backups right now...

iMac 27″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Feb 16, 2021 3:27 AM

Top-ranking reply

Barney-15E

Level 10

116,698 points

Posted on Feb 16, 2021 6:05 AM

which seems to be the worst upgrade in years...

Except for last year's.

And then there was the year before.

Oh, the year before that…

I can't find a current article on how to move your backup to another drive. This one is archived.

Carbon Copy Cloner will not clone a Big Sur Time Machine backup.

It may not be possible anymore, as you have found.

Why not just erase and start the backup over? If you are expecting Time Machine to be archival, your are mistaken. It will hold onto recently deleted items for a while (most likely until full), but it will eventually delete them. If you've recently deleted a lot of stuff and want the ability to get that back, that would be the only reason to keep the old backup.

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How clone a Time Machine backup APFS volume?

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