Can

How is the drive formatted?

It is formatted as

Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

GUID partition

Unchecked "Ignore ownership of this volume"

Here are the instructions that I followed. I got to Line 21 - got the above message and nothing more.

I am using a WD 2Tb large drive and a WD 2Tb portable

To have the existing Time Machine backups on the new backup drive, follow these steps:

1. Connect the new backup drive to your Mac.
2. Open Disk Utility (located in the Utilities folder).
3. In Disk Utility, select the new drive's icon, then make sure it has a GUID partition, and is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), which you can check on the "Format:" line at the bottom of the window.
4. If it is not formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), reformat the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a GUID partition. If you do not know how, see the steps in this article.
   Note: Back up any important data on the drive before you format it.
5. Open a new Finder window. In the Finder sidebar, click the icon of the new backup drive and choose Get Info from the File menu or press Command-I (⌘-I)
6. Make sure "Ignore ownership on this volume" at the bottom of the "Sharing & Permissions:" section is not checked.
7. Open the Time Machine pane in System Preferences. Choose Time Machine > Open Time Machine Preferences…
8. Slide the Time Machine switch to Off.
9. Open a new Finder window. In the Finder sidebar, click the icon of the current backup drive.
10. Open a new Finder window. In the Finder sidebar, click the icon of the new backup drive.
11. Drag the folder "Backups.backupdb" on the current backup drive to the root level of the new backup drive.
    Note: If the drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended but without journaling, OS X may state that "the volume has the wrong case sensitivity" to be used as a back up disk.
12. Enter an administrator name and password, then click OK to start the copying process. This may take some time to complete because all the backups will be copied.
13. After the copy has completed, open Time Machine preferences and click "Select Disk…".
14. Select the new backup drive, then click "Use Backup Disk".

Last Modified: May 28, 2013

One of the drives in my mirrored RAID failed and I'm using the above instructions to try to try to copy the TM files to another drive. I've got about 548GB to copy.

Problem 1) Finder copy runs for about 9+ hours "preparing". I went to sleep. When I woke up, there's the message "....can't be copied because there isn't enough free space". Where isn't there enough space? It would have been courteous to pause and let me clear up some free space where-ever it was needed. It appears I can't use Finder copy.

Problem 2) The ditto CLI copy isn't working either. It looks like TM is using hard links (my guess) and under Backups.backupdb/<system name>/2013-*-*-* the earliest entry is the initial full backup, under the next, ditto started expanding the hard links and was replicating copying. I stopped it when du reported about 10X usage beyond what was under the same source directory. Bummer.

Problem 3) Carbon Copy Cloner says "oh, a TM drive", I can only use block copy. Ok, I try that, but CCC can't dismount the source because Apple SW RAID won't let go of the degraded device. (my guess)

Another probem is that I can't turn off auto-rebuild via the CLI. Either the target name is invalid, or when the RAID is up, I get an error message (locked out, I guess).

So, any help on making a copy work would be appreciated.