Time Machine Transfer to New Disk

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Level 1

120 points

Time Machine Transfer to New Disk

I am trying to transfer my Time Machine to a new and larger disk. I have followed the instructions on preparing the new disk. I have tried the drag and drop of the current Time Machine to the new disk two times. Both times it stops after about 6 hours and says that there is one or more of the items cannot be accessed or there is a problem with the item.

The one thing I have noticed is that the new disk has permissions are system: read & write ; wheel: read & write ; everyone; read only. The current Time Machine disk has permissions me: read & write ; admin: read & write ; everyone: write. Is this the right track or should I dive in and give Disk Warrior a shot at it.

I think I could do a mergePartitions on the current disk to get the other part of it freed up. However, the current disk is about 5 years old and I think it should be replaced. I have plenty of other uses for a spare disk for non-critical functions, so I don't just want to start over on the new disk and keep the current one on the shelf.

Any help or direction appreciated. I didn't find anything about this particular problem on the great pondini's site.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

Posted on Oct 9, 2015 11:59 AM

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Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

684,027 points

Oct 10, 2015 9:13 AM in response to folksong

Try using Disk Utility/Restore to copy the backup to a new location. Please note that this will reformat the destination partition.

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Answer 2

folksong Author

Level 1

120 points

Oct 10, 2015 7:36 PM in response to Eric Root

Thanks for the suggestion. I was also thinking about using `cp -r` or `ditto`. I think I have found the problem however. I rifled through the TimeMachine structure and found that there was an item from back in 2014 that was labelled as .inprogress. I got rid of that file and am running DiskWarrior again to make sure that everything can be found. I think I can then do the transfer via the Finder. I will post back here success of failure -- either to properly close out thread or ask for continued help.

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Answer 3

Eric Root

Level 10

684,027 points

Oct 11, 2015 8:49 AM in response to folksong

You are welcome.

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Answer 4

folksong Author

Level 1

120 points

Oct 11, 2015 10:04 AM in response to folksong

It turns out the .inprogress directory was not the problem or at least the whole problem. I am currently running a `lsof +D on the Backups.backupdb`. That is a recursive search to find any open files. If nothing turns up there, I think there is some corruption on the Time Machine volume. There would be no point in force recovering that to a new disk. It would be safer to just keep the Time Machine hard disk for a while before I re-purpose it and start with a new disk. I have other weekly back ups on DVD going back much farther than the Time Machine covered.

I recently needed to pull a financial record that was 7 years old. It took me less than 30 minutes to pull it from a back up DVD.

The old saying is true. There are two types of computer users. Those that have had hard disk problems and those that will.

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