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Issue while copying Backups to new external hard drive

Hello everybody,


I bought a new bigger external hard drive for my TimeMachine backups. I am trying to migrate the data of the old Time Machine encrypted backup disk into the new one.

I have followed the instructions of this Apple tutorial with slight changes because my source and destination backup disks are encrypted.

This means that in step 4 I formatted the new drive using the filesystem Mac OS Extended (Encrypted Journaled).

The issue appears between step 12 and step 13, when, after the "Preparing to copy" window I get a "Copy" window with this message:

One or more items in "Backups.backupdb" can't be changed because they are in use.

At this point, I can "Skip" or "Stop" or "Continue"... I tried to continue, but the size of the Backups.backupdb destination directory is different than the source. Thus I am worried that the copy was not successfull.

What should I do to properly migrate my Time Machine encrypted disk to a bigger one?


Thanks in advance,

Marco

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.1)

Posted on Feb 24, 2014 12:16 PM

Reply
4 replies

Mar 2, 2015 2:32 PM in response to marcoskv

I'm having the same problem while trying to migrate an old TimeMachine backup to a new, larger disk. I've tried everything I can think of including starting in Safe Mode and closing processes before initiating the copy. Both of my disks are formatted for Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Any ideas? As of this writing there are 478 page view and 31 I-have-this-question-too's.

Issue while copying Backups to new external hard drive

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