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Moving Time Machine to new disk after disk issues

Hi all,

I'm not sure what to do, after my 2 TB USB-disk with my Time Machine back-up ran in to trouble (possibly after a power interruption). The computer (MacBook Air 2013 with Catalina 10.15.7) gives a notice "macOS can't repair the disk...", I can however still access the back-up and this seems to work fine (I could of course only try a limited number of files) and the drive sounds normal and healthy, so it seems worth to try and migrate the data to a new 3 TB USB-disk for future back-ups.


Last night I cloned the disk using Disk Utility with my Mac in recovery mode (it did let me do it in normal mode due to permission issues on the source disk, so I booted while holding cmd+r) and although the computer reported success, the new clone did not want to play ball (it did not mount). I assume it copied the fault from the original disk. I tried disk repair in Disk Utilities on the new clone, but it was not able to repair the disk.


So I'm ready to try something else, but what?


Some other notes:

If I attach the old USB-disk, it takes a very long time to mount (while being obviously busy in the mean time), but does eventually show up. The cloned disk did more or less the same thing, but did not show up in finder (you could see it with system information and Disk Utility).

The old USB-disk is Case-sensitive HFS+ with a GUID partition-table (which was the format chosen by the Mac at the time I started the back-up)


Posted on Apr 3, 2021 9:50 AM

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Posted on Apr 3, 2021 12:20 PM

Apple has instructions for this, it's basically copying the complete Time Machine backup folder from the old drive to the new drive and continuing from there with the new drive. Apple specifically says to do the copy using the Finder, not some other method (you used another method). See this article

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/if-the-time-machine-backup-disk-is-full-mh15137/10.15/mac/10.15


That said, Apple's instructions presume that your old Time Machine backup drive is clean and uncorrupted. Since yours is corrupted, unpredictable results may ensure if you try to copy it. In fact you already noted that some permissions were incorrect and a somewhat elaborate method (which ultimately did not work) had to be tried to do the copy.


For those reasons, I suggested not trying to copy the old backups, instead just keeping that drive for emergencies only but start a new backup series on a new disk. This is triaging a non-ideal situation. I would format and re-check your new disk anew also, it sounds like it has been corrupted from something on the old bad one?


What I have started doing is using TWO Time Machine external drives. When there are two, Time Machine simply alternates between them for the backups. So each one has backups every two hours, offset by one hour. This ensures that if a Time Machine disk goes bad (they all do eventually if you use them long enough ...) you can continue with the full history on the other backup disk while you are arranging to replace the failed one.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Apr 3, 2021 12:20 PM in response to Tool-box

Apple has instructions for this, it's basically copying the complete Time Machine backup folder from the old drive to the new drive and continuing from there with the new drive. Apple specifically says to do the copy using the Finder, not some other method (you used another method). See this article

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/if-the-time-machine-backup-disk-is-full-mh15137/10.15/mac/10.15


That said, Apple's instructions presume that your old Time Machine backup drive is clean and uncorrupted. Since yours is corrupted, unpredictable results may ensure if you try to copy it. In fact you already noted that some permissions were incorrect and a somewhat elaborate method (which ultimately did not work) had to be tried to do the copy.


For those reasons, I suggested not trying to copy the old backups, instead just keeping that drive for emergencies only but start a new backup series on a new disk. This is triaging a non-ideal situation. I would format and re-check your new disk anew also, it sounds like it has been corrupted from something on the old bad one?


What I have started doing is using TWO Time Machine external drives. When there are two, Time Machine simply alternates between them for the backups. So each one has backups every two hours, offset by one hour. This ensures that if a Time Machine disk goes bad (they all do eventually if you use them long enough ...) you can continue with the full history on the other backup disk while you are arranging to replace the failed one.

Apr 3, 2021 10:46 AM in response to Tool-box

I have seen this type of behavior with external USB drives when they fail. They sometimes appear as "read only" at that point and when Disk Utility First Aid is run (to try to repair the faulty disk) it either cannot repair it or First Aid itself freezes.


The reason the external disk takes so long to mount is that fsck is run automatically by the MacOS when it detects a disk with a corrupted file system, which it probably has. Running fsck can takes several minutes or even many minutes if/when errors are encountered (which has no doubt happened in this instance) as it will try to repair and rerun.


My experience is that such disks are no longer reliable and should ultimately be discarded. You can keep it for a while since it does have backed up copies of your files but it is no longer a reliable disk. You need a reliable disk for a backup.


If the power failure caused the damage there might be physical damage, as well as a corrupted file system.


I suggest immediately procuring a new external disk for backups and starting a new Time Machine backup on it. While that new Time Machine disk won't have the history of your earlier backups, your faulty disk does and it appears that you can at least read files and copy them from it for now.


My approach to these external drives has evolved over the years. I used to invest in time, energy, software tools etc. to try to "repair" them. No more, if Disk Utility or TechTool Pro cannot fix it, I'm done. I now consider them as consumables, much like a battery, eventually they will all wear out. Some last 10 years or more, some wear out after several years. They are inexpensive (under $100 typically) so I find that the hassle of trying to get prorated reimbursements via warranties, etc. is not worth it, the postage for returning the drive is often a good fraction of the cost of the drive! However I do buy drives only with warranties that are 3 years or more (5 years if I can find them), I figure that increases the odds of a higher quality product and lower likelihood of failure.

Apr 3, 2021 1:39 PM in response to steve626

Thank you!


I missed that support article, but it takes away my hesitancy of 'just' copying the file. I was afraid to loose important internal structure.


The changing of permissions seems to be normal procedure once a fault is detected and - if I understand it right - Disk Utility has lost some of it's standard permissions due to Apple tightening security in newer OS versions (I do not have the knowledge to have a personal opinion on these things... 🙂).


The actual notice "macOS can't repair the disk..." does continue to state that data can be retrieved without a problem (since mine states it in Dutch, I did not copy the whole message as it seems a quite common notice) and follows the drive should be reformatted (but I don't think I will trust it ever again).


I did reformat the new disk already and it seems perfectly fine. Tonight I'll do another attempt to move the data over (it's actually under 500 MB, so - time wise - not the biggest disaster)


And I was planning to start to use two drives for Time Machine when this happend. The new drive I ordered for this purpose was never delivered (so I ordered another one when this ocurd).




Moving Time Machine to new disk after disk issues

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