Upgrading Time Machine to a Larger Drive

[ParishM]

what is the best/easiest way to migrate time machine backup files
to a new larger drive ? i'm upgrading a 1TB drive to a 4TB drive.

i tried using carbon copy once before and it apparently didn't
recognize the files and created a whole new backup in addition
to the existing backup.

 

[Weaselboy]

Just use Disk Utility to clone the old drive to the new. First format the new drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in Disk Util. Then go to the restore tab and drag the old drive into source and the new drive into destination, then click restore.

 

[ParishM]

Just use Disk Utility to clone the old drive to the new. First format the new drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in Disk Util. Then go to the restore tab and drag the old drive into source and the new drive into destination, then click restore.

that's exactly what i did yesterday. i bought a new WD MyBook 4TB, formatted it in
disk utility and used the restore feature with the old TM drive as source and WD 4TB
drive as destination. it took about 8 hours and when i woke up there were two drives
named time machine on my desktop and the new one showed 4TB. i like my fancy
external enclosure much better than the plastic mybook case so i pulled the 4TB drive
out and put it in my fancy enclosure. for some reason OS X now
says it doesn't recognize the drive so i click initialize and now it only sees 1.8TB out of
4 and it has some weird name like disk 01hrsko. nothing i did would make it see the
entire 4TB including repartitioning and formatting.

i'm totally lost, all i did was move the drive to a different enclosure. no idea why this happened ?

 

[Weaselboy]

If you put it back in the WD enclosure, does it work okay then? I'm wondering if there is something proprietary about the WD enclosure/drive setup that makes is incompatible with third party enclosures?

 

[ParishM]

If you put it back in the WD enclosure, does it work okay then? I'm wondering if there is something proprietary about the WD enclosure/drive setup that makes is incompatible with third party enclosures?

yep tried that, even tried connecting it to a windows machine.
the windows machine saw the whole 4TB (3725.99) in disk
management but wouldn't let me format or partition it and
it didn't show up in my computer.

 

[ParishM]

Update : it appears WD uses some kind of encryption on the MyBook
drives and also a proprietary piggyback USB controller. a few posts
i found claim a full low-level format and removing the USB controller
makes the drive usable in other enclosures or desktops.

i'm trying a full write-zero's format now, estimated time is 52 hours
for a 4TB drive.