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Move Time Machine Backup to new drive

Just In Case

I tried the Disk Utility method, but kept having problems with it telling me it could not create the backup. I even formatted the destination drive and checked permissions to no avail. Finally, as a last ditch effort, I checked "Erase Destination" and that was all it took. I don't know why as I had formatted the drive a couple of time during this mess, but none the less, if you run in to problems, give this a try. I went from a 250G drive with 3 G free to a 1TB drive with 640 G free. Ahhh...free space.....
 
time machine

for network drives, and (possibly - not tested) how to move TM backup from larger partition to a smaller one, refer to this page:
http://www.readynas.com/?p=253
i won't go into details about how this works, but the steps are outlined there.
for those interested in tech. details you can read up on sparsebundles
 
Super Duper didn't work for me.

I'm switching from a 750GB boot drive with a 1TB Time Machine backup to 1TB Boot drive with a Drobo Time Machine drive. I Super Duper'd the 1TB Time Machine to the Drobo drive, which was about 800GB of data. Leopard / Time Machine found the new Drobo drive and started to perform a backup to it, but watching the preferences showed it trying to copy 450GB of new information to the Drobo. This was clearly a problem because the last backup had occurred about 1 day ago and no files had been added.
 
datamgmt said:
Go in to 'System Preferences' and turn Time Machine off
Plug both disks into your USB ports
Start 'Disk Utilities'
Click on 'Restore'
Set the source to your old disk
Set the destination to your new disk
and start the process

My 80Gb disk was copied in a 250Gb disk in 50 mins for a copy and 33 mins for the verify.
Click to expand...

Just to let you guys know that this method worked great for me.

On a side note, after the copy, the new partition didn't have the "Owner's Enabled" flag activated (don't even know what it *truly* does, but I assume it's relevant/important). To restore it, I just ran the following command on the terminal:

Code: 
vsdbutil -a /Volumes/<your_new_volume>/

Don't know if it's required by I did it and it worked flawlessly with TM! You can check the status of "Owner's Enabled" both in Disk Utility or by using the same command as above but with -c instead of -a.
 
Has anybody run into issues trying to delete the old backups.backup folder? I must not have been rigid enough with my perferences because I have a bunch of boot.efi files in my garbage can that I cannot delete.

I can't seem to be able to "unlock" the files to delete them. Any suggestions?
 
Success

datamgmt said:
Go in to 'System Preferences' and turn Time Machine off
Plug both disks into your USB ports
Start 'Disk Utilities'
Click on 'Restore'
Set the source to your old disk
Set the destination to your new disk
and start the process

My 80Gb disk was copied in a 250Gb disk in 50 mins for a copy and 33 mins for the verify.
Click to expand...

This worked for me too, 160GB with only a couple of GB to spare up to a new 750GB disk. It took quite a while, 3 to 4 hours including the verify, but worked like a dream, in the end it was so easy.

I did select the "Erase Destination" box in the disk utility, I don't know if it made any difference, then it was easy to change the disk in the TM preferences.

Thanks for the advice. :D
 
Could I get some advice? I have a Macbook that I back up via Time Machine to an external FW drive. It has been running Leopard for a year now and thus I have a lot of data backed up on my Time Machine.

Now I have a new mac and I'd like to free my Macbook from being tied down to the FW drive. So I've connected the FW drive to the new mac and shared it in system preferences, then went to the Macbook and opened Time Machine preferences and chose the FW drive over the network. I really thought it would see that it was the same drive with the same backups and just continue backing up to it, but instead it created a sparsebundle file and tried to make a brand new backup.

Any idea why this didn't work? I did change the name of the FW drive, but I didn't think that would matter. Is there any way to do this so I don't lose my old backups?

Thanks for any advice.
 
Having this same problem - but on a larger scale...

Trying to move my existing Time Machine data from a 1TB disk to a 2TB external. I tried using Apple's disk utility to copy (made sure the erase destination box was checked) - and after about 36 hours of working, it reported that the copy failed.

Any better thoughts on this topic? I have SuperDuper - so I could use that to clone the disk, but are there any other suggestions out there? I searched the forums and this is the only relevant thread that came up (and 2 years old!)

- C
 
SuperDuper is probably your best bet. (Or a similar program like Carbon Copy Cloner.)
 
Thank you!

The above post was perfect. Strangely, I couldn't find it searching the forums here, or Google, or elsewhere... I had neglected one step, and it made all the difference.

Thanks again!

- c
 
crazzyeddie said:
I really think a block-level copy will work... here is my reasoning:

1) The reason the file-level copy is taking so long is because Time Machine makes it look like you have many copies of each unchanged file, one for every backup. But its not actually backing up the file, its just linking to the old one (whats called a hard link).
CCC is trying to copy every single version of that file whether its changed or unchanged because it sees the hard link as the file, not a link. With a block-level copy, it doesn't care about files or link, it just copies the 1's and 0's to the new drive. SO this will be faster... as fast as you would think it would take the copy xGBs of data.

2) With the block copy, it will put everything back in its exact spot on the new drive, but your drive will be bigger!

3) Before you start the block copy, make sure you turn Time Machine OFF. It will try to backup in the middle of the clone and mess things up. In fact, have no apps running when you attempt it.

4) With a block copy you MUST tell CCC to erase the Target drive before cloning. This shouldn't be a problem as TM requires it own partition anyway.
Click to expand...

Did anyone try the Unix method ? Under Mac OS X is a Unix machine. The unix "tar" command would process hard links correctly. I'll do a couple of tests and come back with a detailed recipe.

Yves
 
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