How do I restore a case-sensitive, journaled Time Machine backup to a case-insensitive, journaled filesystem?

In general, there is no way to do it without renaming files. Suppose you have a folder on a case-sensitive volume in which there are files named "foo," "Foo," and "FOO." You can't copy that folder to a case-insensitive volume without renaming at least two of the files. How should the files be renamed? You have to decide that at the time; TM isn't going to make the decision for you.

If you're absolutely sure there are no name conflicts like the above, then you can use either a third-party cloning tool (e.g., Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper) or the built-in rsync command-line program to copy all the files from a case-sensitive volume to a case-insensitive one.

If there are name conflicts, you have to resolve them first. How you do that is up to you.

Hi Linc,

I was hoping to message you directly as i've found two threads you've responded to which are similar to my problem, rather than hijacking an old thread.

I put a question up because i have a hard drive the mac store gave me and they formatted it to move all my itunes onto it. NOw i want to back up that hard drive to another hard drive (to be double safe i don't lose my itunes) and i get this case senstive problem. I've been reading for hours and a helpful guy on here has also made loads of suggestions... but it seems there is NO WAY to back up the case-senstive, journaled hard drive to a regular WD Journaled (un-case senstive) drive...

Someone told me to download CCC - tried that... SAME THING! It says it's case sensitive and can't transfer.

I have a brand new WD 3rd hard drive with nothing on it... tried to copy to that. Won't work. Reformatted that.... Won't work.

I am happy to reformat the first case-senstive hard drive but losing my itunes is NOT an option. How the he** do you back up a case sensitive drive so it can then be reformatted to make it non-senstivie?

The itunes library is way too big to just drag back onto my laptop and then move onto a new journaled drive...

here is my issue : https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4017398?answerId=18610586022#18610586022

If you can offer hep i would be really grateful!

PS i'm not 'absolutely sure' i don't have case conflicts in the file names. I have NO idea what any of this means! I know i have files that have capital letters in if that's what you mean in your response to this thread...

But i don't know anything about this stuff, other than this error and then spending all day online trying to find a way around it that doesn't require a computer science doctorate.

Case IN-sensitive:

foo FOO and Foo are all the same filename. Asking the Finder to copy one of these into a directory will replace any other that exists there.

Case Sensitive

foo FOO and Foo are all unique, and can exist in the same directory without conflict.

Thanks Grant,

I know what case insensitive and sensitive are... But i have probably tens and tens of thousands of files, maybe more so i have no idea without looking at every single one if they are capitalised or not and if there are other files on the other hard drive with the same names with different cases.

I'd assume if any files did have the same name in both places, they would have the same case spelling, because they would be a copy of the original file... but i have no way of being sure what these file cases would be unless i guess wrote every single one out on paper and cross referenced it or something...

I suggest you use the Finder to copy a Folder at a time from Case-sensitive drive to case-Insensitive drive. It should give you a warning when a file will be replaced with one that now appears to have the same name, and you can deal with it on a case-by-case basis. You can also check to see whether the number of files in the source VS destination has decreased.

Mac OS X has near a half-million files, but there should be no duplicates of any significance. Feel free to copy those in very large chunks.

Another alternative is to do a new Install of Mac OS X onto the new case-insensitive drive, then add your User files in the way I described above.

Hey Grant, thanks for your suggestion.

Somone on another thread suggested CCC to me which worked perfectly! 🙂

I just couldn't move the old backups, but that's fine. They're pretty old backups that would eventually get deleted anyway with future backups. CCC does let you copy TM back ups, but it sounded a bit too complicated and disaster-prone for my inexperience. But at least i got my itunes completely moved over to a journaled INsensitive drive now, AND i made a back up of it on another journaled insenstive drive via TM too 🙂

I found a way to restore from a case-sensitive backup rather easily. It's a rather drastic solution, which I was forced to do when a friend's MacBook Air died and went through service, coming back with a wiped disk. Then I discovered her Time Machine disk was formatted Case Sensitive.

Reformat the drive and do a clean install of MacOS X. Then open Migration Assistant, use the option to migrate the user from a Time Machine drive.

Worked like a charm. This only migrates apps, settings, and user data, so you're not overwriting your new OS installation. I think that's a cleaner solution.