Time Machine copy to a new drive stalls at the same place every time

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Time Machine copy to a new drive stalls at the same place every time

Article: HT5096 I get to step 12 but it never finishes. The copy stalls at the exact same place each attempt to copy. It does this on each of three different 3.0 TB external Firewire 800 drives I try one at a time to copy to.

Each copy attempt takes about 20 hours until the copy stalls with 1.09TB of 1.33TB copied, 3 hours and 68,076 items left to copy every time, every drive.The copy progress window in Finder is still active with an annimated blue progress bar,with no harddrive activity. It will continue this until I stop the copy. The only way to stop the copy attempt is to Force Quit Finder.

I don't know what else to do. This should be very simple.

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), 24" 3.06 GHz, 8 GB ram, early 2009

Posted on Dec 23, 2012 11:43 AM

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Answer 1

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Linc Davis

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Dec 23, 2012 2:22 PM in response to Alfer

Although the documentation says you can copy Time Machine backups in the Finder, it sometimes doesn't work. In my experience, it never works.

Launch Disk Utility, open the built-in help, and search for the term "Duplicate". Follow the instructions.

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Answer 2

Alfer Author

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Dec 24, 2012 12:20 PM in response to Linc Davis

This worked great. Thank you very much. I will use this method in the future.

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Answer 3

Mar 12, 2013 5:23 AM in response to Linc Davis

This worked for me too. My experience had been similar to Alfer's, although I had a "mere" 700GB of backup files to relocate. The Duplicate Disk routine in Disk Utility was very straightforward and all I had to do at the end -- the process took approx 15 hours, so leave it overnight -- was to change, in Finder, the name of the destination drive, so that it no longer matched the source drive. Moving the Time Machine backups in this way also avoided the potential expense of buying Carbon Copy Cloner or similar, of course. Thanks, Linc Davis, for this excellent tip.

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Answer 4

Aug 2, 2013 10:32 PM in response to Linc Davis

I also want to thank you for this tip about transfering a TM backup to a new drive. Using Disk Utility worked liked a charm in a fraction of the time.

However, I am now having trouble with the computer (2012 MacBook Air) recognizing its duplicated backup on the new larger drive. (Went from a 1TB Western Digital to a 2TB WD) When I go to System Prefs to set up TM it starts to run a new complete backup from scratch.

This whole project was about continuing to use the previous TM BU on a larger drive. Do you have any thoughts on what I might do to make this work? Something in permissions maybe?

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