How to transfer Time Machine backups

For the Disk Utility "Operation not Permitted" error, try granting "Full Disk Access" to the Disk Utility. That said, I had encountered some errors with the Scan for Restore... Disk Utility command on Monterey. This same command worked with the Disk Utility on Catalina (and possibly Big Sur).

kai2718 wrote:

• Hi,

although there are some answers on this topic, they don't seem to work on macOS Monterey.

I would like to copy Time Machine backups from one external drive to another larger one and use the new drive for my backups from now on. How do I do this?

Some problems I encountered with other suggestions are

When using cp -R via command line to manually copy the Backups.backupdb folder, it produces a lot of "cannot find file: Backups.backupdb/..." errors.

• When I copy the Backups.backupdb folder manually, I cannot add it as a Time Machine drive afterwards because it wants to format the drive and then the data is gone (even if previously formatted in MacOS Extended (Journaled) or APFS).

• When I try to use the "Restore" option in Disk Utility to clone the volume, the process fails with the message "Operation not permitted".

• In general, I cannot increase the size of a Time Machine partition since it is marked as macOS core storage.

Do you have a suggestion on how to avoid this?

Thank you in advance!

restore items backed up with Time Machine

Restore items backed up with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support

Restore items backed up with Time Machine on Mac - Apple ...

Transfer Time Machine backups from one backup disk to another

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202380 —(seems to have been removed: try the 2/26/2021 archive

https://web.archive.org/web/20210226200806/https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202380

—or try https://www.macworld.com/article/228862/how-to-transfer-a-time-machine-backup-to-another-backup-drive.html )

Thanks for sharing your solution. I wasn't aware of the exact duplicate option in Finder.