Resolved Transferring Time Machine to another Hard Drive

[furcalchick]

I have a 350 GB hard drive that I use as a Time Machine backup, and have for the past few years. Recently, I upgraded my computer to a 2013 MBP from an aging 2006 MB, and with the upgrade, came an increase of hard drive space, from the 80 GB to 500 GB. Which meant eventually, my data wasn’t going to support the new space. So I purchased a 1 TB hard drive to use as a new Time Machine drive.

I decided to copy over the data of the current Time Machine to the new 1 TB external (which took an entire day). During the transfer, I got a few messages that said “this file could not be copied”, and lost about 3 GB of data compared to the old hard drive. The current Time Machine hard drive is in tact.

Now I’m at a crossroads. Did I do something wrong with the Time Machine copying data and try again with another method, or scrap it and either inherit the backup on the older hard drive or start a new backup on the new hard drive? Thanks for the answers in advance.

 

[chscag]

I have a 350 GB hard drive that I use as a Time Machine backup, and have for the past few years. Recently, I upgraded my computer to a 2013 MBP from an aging 2006 MB, and with the upgrade, came an increase of hard drive space, from the 80 GB to 500 GB. Which meant eventually, my data wasn’t going to support the new space. So I purchased a 1 TB hard drive to use as a new Time Machine drive.

I decided to copy over the data of the current Time Machine to the new 1 TB external (which took an entire day). During the transfer, I got a few messages that said “this file could not be copied”, and lost about 3 GB of data compared to the old hard drive. The current Time Machine hard drive is in tact.

Now I’m at a crossroads. Did I do something wrong with the Time Machine copying data and try again with another method, or scrap it and either inherit the backup on the older hard drive or start a new backup on the new hard drive? Thanks for the answers in advance.

You had better luck than me. I followed Apple's instructions on how to transfer my Time Machine backups to a new and larger hard drive but never could get it to work right. I wound up instead keeping the original drive and started making new backups on the larger drive. It meant I had to keep two Time Machine hard drives handy in case I needed to restore from the original drive. I also clone my hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner, just in case.

 

[Weaselboy]

Now I’m at a crossroads. Did I do something wrong with the Time Machine copying data and try again with another method, or scrap it and either inherit the backup on the older hard drive or start a new backup on the new hard drive? Thanks for the answers in advance.

Assuming you formatted the new drive to Mac OS Extended then dragged the backups.backupdb file over, then you did nothing wrong and it is difficult to say what went badly. But I for sure would not trust that backup now. I would erase the new drive and start with a fresh TM backup set.

 

[furcalchick]

Assuming you formatted the new drive to Mac OS Extended then dragged the backups.backupdb file over, then you did nothing wrong and it is difficult to say what went badly. But I for sure would not trust that backup now. I would erase the new drive and start with a fresh TM backup set.

There's about a 1.2 GB difference between the new and old drives, and several files were unable to be copied. The popup "The operation can’t be completed because one or more required items can’t be found.(Error code -43)" appeared several times, but I can't tell what exactly got eaten in the transfer.

 

[Le Big Mac]

All I can really add is that I've managed to do this successfully in the past, but it doesn't always work.

My bigger view though is "so what". Start a new backup. Keep the old backup just in case, although realistically how likely are you to need to go back so far? I consider a year of backups more than enough . . . indeed, even a couple weeks is sufficient.

 

[furcalchick]

Thanks for the tips guys! Decided to just make a new backup on the new hard drive and have the old Time Machine HD as an archive.

 

[macs4nw]

Thanks for the tips guys! Decided to just make a new backup on the new hard drive and have the old Time Machine HD as an archive.

The right thing to do. Keep in mind you may run into the same "this file could not be copied" situation when doing the new back-up directly from your old 2006 machine, since those possibly corrupted (or incompatible) files could very well already have existed on your old computer and subsequently made it onto your previous 350GB (TimeCapsule) HDD.

Just curious, how did you copy that 350GB of data onto your new 1TB HDD to make that take an entire day?