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Level 1

12 points

Cloning external drive with Time Machine backups (very basic question)

I'd like to clone an external drive used to backup multiple Macs (running Monterey if that makes a difference).

I have an empty external drive, newly formatted with an APFS filesystem. I've turned off automatic Time Machine backups on the source disk.

Do I drag and drop the individual Time Machine disk icons onto the new disk?

I'm already trying this. Looks like the disk image is copying, so the clone doesn't look like a Time Machine drive. Hmm.

Or is there a better way?

MacBook Pro 15″

Posted on Oct 25, 2023 3:28 PM

Top-ranking reply

tbirdvet

Level 6

14,327 points

Posted on Oct 25, 2023 4:04 PM

You really cannot move TM files to a new drive and then have it working again (or even clone a TM drive). You should always start a new TM backup on a new drive and keep the old one just in case it is needed.

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Cloning external drive with Time Machine backups (very basic question)

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