How do I transfer my existing Time Machine backup from the old, maxed-out disk to the new one? I'm running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard; the steps might be different for other versions of OS X.
As it turns out, you can't just drag your old Time Machine backups to the new disk using a Finder copy. Time Machine creates all kinds of "hard links" to the files that aren't changed. If you just copy these files in the Finder, you'll create full copies of all the links, ballooning the size of your backup exponentially. Instead, you need to use a Block Copy operation. This requires that you completely erase the new drive as part of the copy procedure.
Here's an overview of the steps I followed to transfer my Time Machine backups. Note that I use both "drives" and "volumes" to refer to logical disk drive volumes.
- Ensure that the system isn't trying to work with your Time Machine drives.
- Turn off Time Machine & stop using the original drive for backups.
- Tell Spotlight not to index your Time Machine drives.
- Perform a Block Copy of your original Time Machine database to the new drive.
- Tell Time Machine to use the new drive as the Time Machine backup drive.
Could not restore - Operation not permittedeven with Time Machine turned off. It looked like the Mac was trying to access the new drive while I was doing the backup. So, I turned Time Machine off completely, using these steps:
Deactivate Time Machine
- Open Time Machine Preferences.
- Turn Time Machine OFF using the slider switch.
- Click [Change Disk...].
- Select None.
- Click [Use for Backup]
I also recommend turning of Spotlight indexing for the Time Machine drives (not a bad idea in general, because you really don't need to index the backups with both Time Machine & Spotlight).
Turn off Spotlight Indexing for your Time Machine drives
- Open Spotlight preferences (System Preferences > Spotlight).
- Select the Privacy tab.
- Add your Time Machine disks to the Prevent Spotlight from searching these locations list box using the Add (+) button in the lower left, or dragging the disk icon from the Finder to the list box.
Block Copy the Time Machine Backups using Disk Utility Restore
I used the Disk Utility Restore feature to move my data. It failed the first few times because I neglected to erase the destination disk, to allow Disk Utility to use Block Copy mode. Here's how to do it:
- Open Disk Utility.
- Select the original Time Machine volume.
- Click the Restore tab.
- Drag the icon for the original Time Machine volume to the Source: field.
- Drag the icon to for the new Time Machine volume to the Destination: field.
- Click Erase destination -- this is important because it addresses the permissions issues that plagued me, and also allows Disk Utility to use a block copy mode.
- Click [Restore].
Now, it's time to point Time Machine at the new drive.
- Open Time Machine Preferences and authenticate, if required.
- Click [Choose Backup Disk...].
- Select the disk you prepared (I renamed it with a more descriptive name).
- Click Click [Use for Backup].
- Confirm the Time Machine slider is set ON.
Carbon Copy Cloner
I took a close look at the comments on the tip Move Time Machine backup to another drive and it looks like Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) is another option. Since the Disk Utility approach didn't work the first few times, I also tried using CCC to copy the data via block mode.
Here's what I did in Carbon Copy Cloner 3.1.2
- Selected the old Time Machine volume as the Source Disk.
- Selected the new Time Machine volume as the Target Disk.
- For Cloning options:, select Backup everything,
- Check Delete itmes that don't exist on the source (this is required to use block-copy mode, which is recommended). Note that this also erased today's Time Machine backup from the new volume, but that's not a problem.
- Click [Clone].
I never got a chance to try Super Duper, which is highly recommended for block copy operations such as the one I just completed. If you've used Super Duper to transfer your Time Machine database to a new volume, successfully or not, please post a comment with the results of your transfer.
Other Resources
Update
Geordie comments below that he couldn't get these steps to work on OS X 10.5.6 when trying to move from a 250GB LaCie disk to a 1 TB Iomega disk, using Apple's Disk Tools, but succeeded with Super Duper .
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19 comments:
Excellent post, thanks Neil!
I used your steps twice in the last few weeks shuffling my Time Machine backup to different locations, the Disk Utility process worked flawlessly.
cheers,
Paul.
Paul,
I'm glad these steps helped you out! I certainly spent enough time trying to figure this out, and I really appreciate hearing that I might have saved you from going down some of the dead ends that I stumbled through.
Since it's inevitable that your Time Machine volume will fill up at some time, no matter how big it is, I was quite surprised at the lack of documentation on Apple's part, especially since the solution involved their invaluable Disk Utility program.
But, I can't complain, since Time Machine has saved me from data loss disaster more often than I care to admit!
Thank you so much for this post. After spending a day trying different tactics of my own, I found this through a Google search. Worked like a charm! Why didn't I think of that?!
Thank you Neil.
This was the post I'd been looking for over the last 2 months. I had a 750MB drive split with a time machine partition and another I was using to transfer data with window machines. I was losing my earliest back ups as TM was the same size of the iMac HDD which defeats the purpose. The crucial piece of information that i didn't understand was to embiggen the timemachine partition it had to be the first partition (which it wasn't). Once I undestood this, how to copy became new crutial step which your post beautifly explains using the build in features of Leopard.
It took 5hrs to move the 300GB backup from one volume to the other on the same external drive.
I was nervous when it started backing up to the new partition, even though your post was reassuring, I feared it would make a entire new copy When I saw field for previous backups was recorded as:(_ _ _ _ _) was it ignoring them?
The new back up took less than 3 minutes. It worked! It was indeed a continuation. I now have all of the drive for TM barring one 20GB partition to put images of the start up disks.
I wonder if a 300gb original HDD really will fill a 1 TB of changes if its not used as a video scratch disk for example. I thought changes are stored as some kind of links rather than files, like the way picasa stores photo alterations.
Rather than going through the hassle of totally deactivating TM, just do the fail-safe route and boot up from a Leopard DVD, then run Disk Utility from there.
Excellent post!
I naively tried a Finder copy, then searched the web. I got a few answers, but then your post cleared it up by explaining the UNIX hard link issue, and answered other questions to boot.
I'm going to try SuperDuper.
Great post but no matter what I tried, I could not get this to work on OS X 10.5.6 when trying to move from my 250GB LaCie disk to a 1 TB Iomega disk. The files copied across but OS X could not verify the disk afterward and Get Info stated that my 1TB disk was only a 250GB disk!
Eventually used Super Duper and this worked perfectly.
Very useful. I got full success with OSX 10.5.6 by simply following the steps you gave. Except that I partitioned my new disk before the block copy step. Previously I asked to Apple (Apple Care) but got no answer. Even worse... they suggested to copy the Backups.backupdb through the finder. I hope they will automate this possibility in future versions of Time Machine.
I'm trying to move a TM backup to the hard disk on another machine but unable to drag the c: drive from the left column in Disk Utility to the 'destination'. It just won't let me move it there. The TM drive is listed as source but I'm stuck there. Any thoughts?
@Jeff:
I assume that you mean your boot volume when you said you dragged your "c:" drive to the Destination field in Disk Utility. If that is the case, Disk Utility is looking after your best interests! You don't want to use your boot volume as your Time Machine backup (at the very least, this will ERASE YOUR BOOT VOLUME, which you most certainly don't want to do). Instead, invest in an external USB or Firewire drive -- you can get a terabyte these days for just over $100, and that should do the trick!
Ideally, you will use a dedicated drive for your Time Machine backup, and it should also be physically separate from your boot volume, meaning an external or separate internal disk drive.
Hi I really want to give this a go as my time capsule is almost full and want to move my iMac backup to a new 1TB drive. I have tried to follow the instructions but can't drag my time capsule into the source (I am guessing that this is because it is appearing as a shared drive) how do i get the time capsule to be the source? I have tried doing it by dragging the disk icon of the backup file that Time Machine mounts, which then copies as files rather than as a sparse bundle which means that Time Machine doesn't recognise the copy and is unable to continue backing up to it or restore from it. How do i get it to copy as a sparse bundle from Time Machine? Thanks for your help.
@Paul Wright - from your post, it sounds like you've encrypted your Time Machine volume using Apple's built-in encryption, since you mentioned the sparseimage file. I'd suggest unencrypting the Time Machine volume first to see if that works, but frankly, that's just a guess.
I've had lots of problems trying to do low-level file management with the sparseimage file, and I know it won't work the way you want it to if you are booting from the CD, since your files are only unencrypted when you log in, which doesn't happen if you boot from a CD or DVD.
Well, I saw your post as the first result in Google when I typed in my search ...
I'm glad I found it, too, because I wasn't having any luck doing it myself. Thanks a bunch!
Hi Neil
I just got a 1TB StudioBook myself and selected it for Time Machine. The database have been working perfect the first couple of days so I decided to remove it from my USB port and mount it as an Airdisk in my closet with my Airport Extreme. But now Time Machine doesn't recognize my database!
Apparently it thinks it's a new disk or something but it's not.
Any workaround this without block copying to another disk and then back to the AirDisk.
I was hoping I didn't have to move my entire Time Machine content over wifi :)
Thanks - good post!
Alright, this is all good news because it is exactly what I did... except for turning off TM while doing the restore. The upside may be that my TM volume is usually on my wireless network while acting as the time capsule, but I hard wired it for the transfer so it would be faster. That said, the restore went great, and it even recognizes the new drive, and backs up to it... but when I 'enter time machine' it only has today... not the full time frame that the original TM drive has. Did I do something wrong?
Please tell me I am ok... I don't want another 4 hour file transfer!
Thanks
adam
@Jakob & Adam,
I haven't used Time Machine over Wifi as you are doing, so I'm not sure what kind of issues that might raise. I don't think it's specifically using AirPort or WiFi that might cause any issues, but instead the fact that you are mounting the volume as a network share instead of a local disk. This may explain, Jakob, why your Mac sees the disk as a new device (since it's seeing it through AFP, not as a local volume) and may also explain why Adam is seeing unusual behavior with his Time Machine history. My suggested fix is to transfer the data over the network (WiFi) because then you'll be mounting the disk in the same manner as Time Machine will access it in the future.
But honestly, this is all speculation on my part. Does anyone else have any experience working with Time Machine volumes over a network connection? If so, post your tips here to help out Jakob & Adam.
Thanks!
Thanks for the reply, even though it may not be what I wanted to hear :-). Backing up via wifi might take a long long time... but you are saying that the new drive SHOULD be just like the old one? That is, the timeline on the right of the screen when you "enter time machine" should go back as far as the original drive? IF that is the case, I guess I'll go back to the drawing board.
We'll see...
Adam
@Adam,
I don't know if this will work over WiFi. as I don't have any direct experience with using Disk Utility or Super Duper with Time Capsule. Also, since you are using Time Capsule to manage your backup disk, there's another layer of software involved which may prevent you from using the direct block copy method described above.
I'm afraid your question is outside the scope of this post, and my limited knowledge regarding Time Capsule. Let me know if you have any luck, or if you find a solution.
I had the same problem as Goerdie, After ~18 hrs I received an error message "operation timed out" and my new 3TB drive showed up in disc utility as a 1 TB drive with 17 GB available space (ie the original space constraints of the 1 TB disk that I was backing up from). Do you have any idea as to what caused this problem? I will try Superduper and cross my fingers.
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