Move Time Machine history to a new external drive
There are several questions here about doing this, but the suggestions in the responses are not working for me.
I have a MacBook Pro running Ventura 13.3.1 that I have been backing up using TimeMachine to a 4TB external hard drive since June of 2022. I would connect the external drive every few days and let TimeMachine do its thing, usually with no problem. But the last backup it completed was on 3/30, and since then I have tried several times to do a backup, but it kept hanging. It got into the backup itself (i.e., past the setting up stage), then would just stop moving forward. I ran Disk Utilities First Aid on the external drive and got
Running First Aid on “Container disk3”
Checking storage system and repairing if necessary and if possible
Performing fsck_apfs -y -x /dev/disk2s1
Checking the container superblock.
Checking the space manager.
Checking the space manager free queue trees.
Checking the object map.
Checking volume /dev/rdisk3s2.
Checking the APFS volume superblock.
Checking the object map.
error: btn: oid (3472230), xid (1373618), type (0x40000003), subtype (0xb), flags (0x6) level (0)
error: btn: invalid key order: index 51 is greater than index 52 (should be less than)
index 50 key : 15 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 2f 0b 00 00 00 00 00 00
index 51 key : 49 bb 10 00 00 00 00 00 5b 25 07 00 00 00 00 00
index 52 key : 15 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 15 97 00 00 00 00 00 00
index 53 key : 16 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 31 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Object map is invalid.
The volume /dev/rdisk3s2 was found to be corrupt and cannot be repaired.
Verifying allocated space.
error: (oid 0xd2d5) sm_ip: dev_read_finish(53973, 1): Input/output error
Space Verification failed.
The container /dev/disk2s1 could not be verified completely.
Storage system check exit code is 8.
Storage system verify or repair failed. : (-69716)
Operation failed…
I interpreted this to mean there is a problem on the hard drive and that I shouldn't use it anymore. But Time Machine didn't seem to have a problem seeing that there were backups on the disk, so I was hopeful that I could get a new disk, copy over at least some of the old backups, and then resume my backups.
I attached the new drive, allowed it to be reformatted for Time Machine, then removed both it and the old drive from Time Machine, unmounted both of them, waited a few minutes, then reconnected them.
Both drives show up on the desktop with the Time Machine icon, and when I double-click on them they both look like Time Machine disks in Finder. But I can't copy anything from the old drive to the new. I assume this is because MacOS knows both of these drives are Time Machine drives and shouldn't be touched by mere users.
So how do I move whatever history is recoverable from my old Time Machine drive to my new one?
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.6
