Moving a time machine backup

Unfortunately, Apple's infinite wisdom has made it impossible to clone a Time Machine backup. As close as you can come to it is let the Finder do the copy to a hard drive that you have set the ownership and permissions to allow complete copying to. But there is a major pitfall there, it may not be visible through Time Machine.

https://www.macworld.com/article/609296/cant-directly-copy-time-machine-backups.html

Is an excellent overview of what is possible.

I haven't had luck doing that anymore. I just start a new TM drive from scratch and keep the old drive if required just in case.

The closest solution that might work is use migration assistant on your time machine backup from a similar age system that was just created through the recovery mode.

Alas, that will only work on one version of the backup, and not all versions of the backup. If the purpose though is just to get a usable copy of the backup on a larger drive, then that might be easier than just copying the individual folders to a properly authenticated secondary drive.

I agree though it would be so much better if the idea of cloning an existing full time machine backup that is not currently automatically backing up was practical. Hard drives do not last forever, and you do eventually get to the point where the drive it is on is too small.

What happened was that you did not clone the TM backup as that method doesn’t work and it created a completely new one so used up your 6T.

The only way that I have successfully cloned a TimeMachine backup and then continued to use it, is to use SuperDuper (Carbon

Copy Cloner won’t work).

 The trial version of SuperDuper will do that but it will delete everything on your new 6TB disk before starting but you should do that anyway.

It will take a long time especially if it is 2.3TB plus. Once completed choose you new drive in TM preferences and away you go, as long as it is the same source with the same name. So you will be able to have access to your ‘old ‘ TM backup files and subsequent ones on the same disk.

You can’t do harm, for your original TM will be untouched and once you have verified the new 6T works you can either keep the 3T as an archive or use the 3T for something else.

Thank you for the information. Long before I went to Carbon Copy Cloner I was a Superduper fan. So glad to see they have caught up and surpassed it in some ways.