Transfer time machine backups to a new external hard disk.

Hello,

I have an iMac running Ventura 13.4. I have an external hard disk that I have been using for my time machine backups. The disk is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). In the past I was able to write to the drive and move files to/from the drive. As the drive is almost full. I purchased a new larger external hard drive to continue saving time machine backups to. In formatting the new drive, I am only able to format it to APFS, not Mac OS extended. Ins "setting it up" as a time machine backup disc, the drive is now set to read only, and I am unable to copy my previous backups to this drive. I have researched the issue and there does not seem to be any way to do this. I have tried dragging and dropping the old backup files to the disk (prior to setting it up as a time machine disk) - a get a write error that the files cannot be copied; I have deselected permissions and prviledges on the "Info" screen and then tried copying the files (no luck); I tried using the disk restore command in disk utility to copy the contents of the old drive to the new drive; I tried creating a partition after formating with a Mac OS extended partition and then copying; I tried renaming the new drive with the same name as the old backup drive to see if it would skip the reformatting when setting it up as a backup drive in time machine. There was a suggestion of keeping both drives as backup drives and accessing the older backups that way - that doesn't help if my old drive is about to fail. . I noticed that for a new backup disk, time machine doesn't use the same naming protocol or file structure from before, but it will continue to sue the old one on a disk that has older backups on it. At the end of the day, I was unable to find a way to simply copy my old

backups to new drive and access them as before and also write new backups using the same file naming protocol as before (backups.backup). This seems like it should be a no-brainer, no? It would make sense that if apple changed the formattin/file structure of new time machione backups (does APFS have something to do with ti), I would have thought that there would be some sort of a file conversion tool built into Time Machine that would integrate the older files into the new ones.

Anyone else have the same problem and/or found a solution that works? (none of the solutions I found online worked in my case).