Backup a Time Machine backup?

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Backup a Time Machine backup?

When troubleshooting a Mac in the past, I had the scary experience of it erasing my Time Machine backup. Fortunately, I was able to restore the backup onto the drive.

Now I am troubleshooting another Mac, I have my external Time Machine drive and an external blank drive.

For safety's sake, before attempting further troubleshooting of this Mac, I want to backup the Time Machine drive onto the blank drive.

Obviously, I could just drag-copy the documents folder from one drive to the other, but this can cause all kinds of permissions problems. Would it be possible (or better) to use a backup application like Carbon Copy Cloner to do this?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Apr 29, 2016 10:45 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Eric Root

Level 10

684,027 points

Apr 30, 2016 8:31 AM in response to Timothy Arends1

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

You can then go to System PreferencesTime Machine and add the blank drive as a backup disk.

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