Transfer TimeMachine Backups?

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=423564

-Kevin

 

Transfer Airdisk Time machine backups to a wired hard disk

Hi guys

Just adding this to one of the many time machine backup threads as I had quite a specific problem that wasn't solved anywhere else.

I had a time machine backup of my macbook pro on a drive connected to my Airport Extreme. I wanted to transfer this backup to a wired drive so that I could take my mbp and all my backups (about 6months worth) to work (got a new white macbook for home).

Time machine on the Air Disk works by putting all of your backups in a sparsebundle image.

To copy these backups to a new drive hard wired drive here is what I did

1. Turn of Time Machine backups onto the Airdisk

2. Mount the Air Disk normally and mount the sparsebundle with a name that will be something like "Your Username's Macbook.sparsbundle" (You can skip disk checking at this stage as it takes forever)

3. Attach you new wired drive to your mac.

4. Open disk utility.

5. Format the new drive and give it a name that is different to your Air Disk (for example my Air Disk was called "Lacie Disk" and my wired drive was called "Time Machine")

6. In the list of drives on the left hand side of the disk utility you should be a be able to see the sparsebundle disk image with a mountable disk inside it called something like "Back Up of Your Username's Macbook". Select this and click mount.

7. Now the really clever part. Click the restore tab and drag the mounted disk "Back Up of Your Username's Macbook" into the source section.

8. Drag the formatted partition of your new disk into the destination section (I also checked erase destination to be absolutely sure it worked).

9. Hit restore and go do something else for the rest of the day.

10. Once everything has copied and verified un mount the Air Disk.

11. Open time machine prefs and turn on time machine. If the new disk isn't already recognized as a backup disk, select it as one and hit backup now. After preparing the backup it should show all of the old backups that were on the Air Disk.

This worked for me, hope it works for you too.