How to Transfer my Time Machine backups from an external drive 2TB drive to a new 2TB drive.

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How to Transfer my Time Machine backups from an external drive 2TB drive to a new 2TB drive.

Hello. I bought a 2 TB Seagate External drive in 2019 as my Time Machine external drive. The drive was almost half full with other data.So I only had 1TB left of space which is now pretty much filled. I know that Time Machine delete the oldest backup when it run out of space. Instead of doing that I purchase a brand new 2 TB Seagate external Drive this month November 2021 to be my new Time Machine external drive.

What I want to do is to transfer the existing backups from the almost full external drive to the new one. So when I installed the new one Time Machine will continue the backups from the last backups. I know I need to have the Time Machine reformat from EXFAT as it comes to Mac reformat before it can be use as a Time Machine. Can this be done?

If it can then I will delete all the previous backups from the old external drive once I complete the transfer.

Posted on Nov 12, 2021 2:48 PM

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Answer 1

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Jack-19

Level 8

45,872 points

Nov 12, 2021 3:16 PM in response to Bailen2vc

Welcome to Apple Support Communities.

First, honestly, I would return the Seagate drive for a SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE - Western Digital or a G-Technology G-DRIVE mobile USB-C Portable Hard Drive - Apple. These drives are very reliable and have strong enclosures. Seagate external drives do not. These are worth the extra cost.

The G-DRIVEs come pre-formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for Mac. This is perfect if you are using macOS Catalina or earlier, however, if you are using macOS Big Sur or later, you need to reformat to APFS for Time Machine:

Go to Disk Utility (Finder > Go > Utilities)
In Disk Utility, select “View” > “Show All Devices”.
Select the top and non-indented drive in the external section of Disk Utility that matches the name of your external drive.
Click Erase
Name: any name you want
Format: APFS
Scheme: GUID Partition Map
Click Erase

To transfer the backups from your old Time Machine drive to your new one, you can try to Restore a disk using Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support from your old drive, however, it does not always succeed. In any case, after you restore the drive or start fresh, follow the steps here: Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support.

Cheers,

Jack

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Answer 2

Bailen2vc Author

Level 1

8 points

Nov 13, 2021 6:06 PM in response to Jack-19

Hello Jack. Thank you for your response. I spoke via Chat with an Apple support person since I have Apple care and stated my question about how to transfer my existing backups from my external hard drive to a new 2TB Seagate external hard drive and after checking with other support agents he said "Apple does not support what you are asking. He recommended that I plug my new hard drive which is formatted in exFat and click on time Machine and it will reformatted APFS which is the only format recognizes by Time Machine." So I decided to proceed with that.

If for whatever reason I need to look for any old backups (files) that are in the existing backup drive to be replaced I will just switch them.

As far as WD being a better external HD than than Seagate that may be true, however I have had bad experiences with WD products.

My son gave me a 4TB WD portable drive a couple years ago and was using it as NTFS format drive with at least 3 Gig of files, family photos videos from overseas trips etc. One day I was downloading some of my files to my Microsoft HP PC something went wrong where it got stuck in one of the downloaded files. I tried everything so it can continue and nothing I did would continue. It was frozen spinning on that file. Since I could not eject the WD hard drive I shutdown my old HP PC disconnect the Hard drive then boot it back on my PC. When I tried to reconnect back the WD external drive all the sectors heads had bad reads. I took my HD to a place that specialize in recovering data from a damage drive and they could only recover only two sectors not the ones I had my photos and videos.

This year he gave me a brand new WD Easystore 4TB. I have backup some file and movies and series he gave me. When I tried to watch it from the WD drive is so slow executing the video for you to see it like in slow motion. The same goes to music videos or MP3 file. I have to download the files what I want to see or play to my Apple iMac 27" computer and see it from my PC or my TV screen via Air Play fast as normal. So I got not to trust WD products. I never had any of those issues with Seagate products.

Thank you anyway for your advice.

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How to Transfer my Time Machine backups from an external drive 2TB drive to a new 2TB drive.

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