How To Transfer TimeMachine Backup To A New Drive - Monterey

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Level 1

65 points

How To Transfer TimeMachine Backup To A New Drive - Monterey

I have been referring to this link:

How to transfer Time Machine backups - Apple Community

I have a 2TB TimeMachine drive that is giving me errors as being too full. So I received a larger drive today.

I have formatted the new drive as APFS. I have two 4TB volumes on it and one is setup for TimeMachine. I selected one volume as TimeMachine drive and then deselected it. So it is formatted properly.

Before I attempt to copy the old TimeMachine drive to the new one, I have a problem in that there is not a Backups.backupdb folder. Instead, there are a series of folders with the TimeMachine icon on them.

On my other TimeMachine backup drive, there is a Backups.backupdb folder, a subfolder with the name of the former boot hard drive, and subfolders in it of similar titles.

I want to copy the files in the picture below as that is the drive being replaced. Do I create a Backups.bacupdb folder, a subfolder and name it the name of the current boot hard drive, then copy all of these folders?

Or?

In the link I provided, not sure what is meant by "cmd+C, option+cmd+shift+V". Is this a Terminal command? If so, what is the full list of commands to be used?

VMware, macOS 10.14

Posted on Jan 29, 2024 1:41 PM

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Answer 1

Tesserax

Level 10

158,550 points

Jan 30, 2024 1:28 PM in response to LexVAPin

Were these old TM backups to a drive that was formatted in HFS+ or APFS? If the latter, AFAIK there is currently no method to copy the TM snapshots on this drive to a new drive, except by low-level disk duplication. Your best option here would be to use the old backup drive as an archive, and start a new TM backup set with the new drive.

That wasn't an issue with HFS+ formatted backup drives.

You may find the following article an interesting read:

https://eclecticlight.co/2021/10/07/upgrading-to-big-sur-or-monterey-migrating-time-machine-backups/

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Answer 2

John Galt

Level 10

156,326 points

Jan 30, 2024 5:57 PM in response to LexVAPin

Lawrence Hammer wrote:

Yet Apple tells me I can.

I am not going to try.

Good choice indeed.

Apple quietly removed their Support document on the subject a while ago. We may no longer copy recent TM backup drive contents to another (presumably larger) backup drive. As one of our ASC contributors put it, "that dog won't hunt."

Who knows what that Apple representative was thinking, but if he or she cannot point to an Apple Support document that describes how to to it — and there is none — then you're wasting your time.

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Answer 3

Owl-53

Level 10

104,221 points

Jan 30, 2024 5:13 AM in response to LexVAPin

Suggest setting aside the Existing Drive for safe keeping as you may need it in the future

In TM Backup with this older drive attached

Control Click that Drive and choose to remove it from TM Backup

Setup the New Drive in TM Backup

TM Backup makes the Drive, past or present Read and Write protected

One can not Copy and Paste or move the Snap Shot from one external Drive to another External Drive

This is especially more true when the drive is using APFS / GUID

Not even dedicated cloning software can perform what you want to do

https://bombich.com/kb/ccc6/can-i-use-carbon-copy-cloner-clone-time-machine-backup

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Answer 4

LexVAPin Author

Level 1

65 points

Jan 30, 2024 9:04 AM in response to Owl-53

Thanks. I own a paid copy of CCC. I love it but, thanks to the security that Apple has added, it is not as useful as it once was.

I got off of a Chat with Apple Tech Support. Their suggestion was similar to what I read on another Community discussion. I am likely to not try it and just put this drive away.

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Answer 5

Old Toad

Level 10

216,178 points

Jan 30, 2024 4:11 PM in response to LexVAPin

Can you tell us the exact message you get with TM or a screenshot of the message?

Also how much free space do you have on your internal boot drive? If there's not enough to create a local snapshot that will trigger an insufficient space message but not say where it's insufficient. Time Machine is supposed to automatically delete the oldest backup when it need more room for the latest one.

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Answer 6

LexVAPin Author

Level 1

65 points

Jan 31, 2024 6:04 AM in response to Old Toad

I have over 400 GB available on the

Old Toad wrote:

Can you tell us the exact message you get with TM or a screenshot of the message?

Also how much free space do you have on your internal boot drive? If there's not enough to create a local snapshot that will trigger an insufficient space message but not say where it's insufficient. Time Machine is supposed to automatically delete the oldest backup when it need more room for the latest one.

The problem is on the external drive. I have over 400 GB of 1TB free on the boot drive. Only 52 GB free on the Time Machine drive.

Yes, Time Machine is supposed to delete the oldest backup. What happens usually is that I get an error which I ignore. Then the next time it runs, it completes a backup. It almost seems like the backup it deletes goes into the Trash and I have to empty the Trash.

If I get the error again, I will post it here.

Not being too thrilled with this situation, I now have a Time Machine backup with twice the space as the old one.

Thanks everyone for your help.

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