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Moving One Time Machine Volume to Another

M

mad cow disease

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 12, 2005
101
6
I have two drives, a 1 TB and a 4 TB. I am trying to move my time machine backups from the 1 TB -> 4 TB, but keep getting errors. Most annoyingly, it's about 3/4ths of the way through the process (which takes 12-14 hours). These drives are used exclusively for the purpose of backup. They return no errors in disk utility. They are connected directly to the CPU, no hubs or anything like that.

So far I have tried:

1) Directly copying the "backups" folder from the root drive of one drive to the other -> error
2) Imaging drive 1 in disk utility -> error
3) Using disk utility to restore volume 1 to volume 2 -> I/O error

I'm starting to run out of ideas and these errors are starting to piss me off. Any thoughts?
 
crjackson2134

crjackson2134

macrumors 601
Mar 6, 2013
4,823
1,948
Charlotte, NC
mad cow disease said:
I have two drives, a 1 TB and a 4 TB. I am trying to move my time machine backups from the 1 TB -> 4 TB, but keep getting errors. Most annoyingly, it's about 3/4ths of the way through the process (which takes 12-14 hours). These drives are used exclusively for the purpose of backup. They return no errors in disk utility. They are connected directly to the CPU, no hubs or anything like that.

So far I have tried:

1) Directly copying the "backups" folder from the root drive of one drive to the other -> error
2) Imaging drive 1 in disk utility -> error
3) Using disk utility to restore volume 1 to volume 2 -> I/O error

I'm starting to run out of ideas and these errors are starting to piss me off. Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

I've never had any luck doing what you are trying to do but I have tried too.

I think it would be best just to deploy the new larger drive and start a TM backup from scratch. I have a couple of external drives with old TM backups (my final installation of ML, and final installation of MAV).

You can still browse those backups and pull specific data off them if you need to.

I think the problem in trying to copy over the .backup files is that the drive is bootable as well (or at least contains boot information). A straight copy will probably never work.
 
Mr_Brightside_@

Mr_Brightside_@

macrumors 68040
Sep 23, 2005
3,748
2,035
Toronto
I believe that Carbon Copy Cloner can transfer the data properly, I think I used it once successfully.

It's frustrating because apple's own support documents say it can be done but it almost always fails.
 
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