Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat - Latest Comments in How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

remove system fix virus — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 03:31:13 -0000

I don't dare to try to move backups to a new disk, for I'm worried that the backup will be damaged somehow and will not work when it's urgent.

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

Howard — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 11:23:36 -0000

What if the old time machine drive has other content ? My drive has three other folders with movies and data. I don't really want to clone all that garbage too ...

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

Fernando Marcondes — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 08:39:09 -0000

Hi, The best article for this subject. Easy and clean. Thanks!!!

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

GeoffX — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 02:06:04 -0000

Worked like a charm, even from Stable Snow Leopard to 'Lion', I have all my TM backups on a much roomier drive. Thanks for such clear and concise instructions.

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

mechengie — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 15:07:39 -0000

Oh my gosh! Thanks Stephen.. life saver of a tutorial. Been wondering how I was going to upgrade my HD's and move all the old TM files over to the new drive...

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

Eoin — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 08:52:38 -0000

Hi,
I was just wondering if this method of copying Time Machine data would be suitable for the time machine partitions of a dual external hard drive system where I would have two external drives, each with say, three partitions: one for time machine, one for a bootable clone, and one for other data (eg movies/photos/music).

The plan is to rotate the drives on a weekly basis. This would enable me to:
a) keep TM backups going when I'm off-site,
and,
b) ensure that if one of the drives fail (as my precious iomega ultramax did a few weeks ago!), that I would only lose at most 1 week's worth of data.

My main worry is that making a block-by-block copy of the original TM drive and then using BOTH the original and copy drives could somehow screw up the directories, etc, especially if both drives happen to be connected at the same time for copying other data.

Any ideas??

I would be using a desktop external HDD connected by USB and a portable HDD connected by FW if this makes any difference??

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

Nonniem — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 23:04:24 -0000

I have tried 4 times to get this to work. First three came up with "Could not Restore. Operation not permitted". I went back and reformatted the destination HD. This time though I formatted both the mounted volume and the disk image. It went through the whole process and then came up with "Could not restore - Cannot allocate memory". I have the log report and snapshots of the DU screens. Can you help me?

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

nothingthreedays — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 09:36:07 -0000

great piece of info - ensured erase destination was checked straight of the bat as that seemed to make good sense - and after a few hours of my mbp being left alone, time machine backups neatly migrated to new backup media... Cheers ta.

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

Quiroulebamboule — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:20:07 -0000

great tutorial Stephen! Works perfectly for me the 1st time! thx!

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

r4s — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:26:44 -0000

Well, how do I move time machine backups from one NAS to another NAS?

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

Robb — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:11:58 -0000

It worked! Well, not at first. I had to follow the secondary process:
Select the destination disk and then the source and then elect to erase the destination disk. After three tries that was the trick to get it to go. It preserved my 300 gigs of archived material and started up like it had never changed disks.

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

marcovalente — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 15:54:36 -0000

Hi,
instructions are clear, and the process easy. But it does not work for me. It stops restoring issuing the message "Descriptor not valid" (approximate translation from Italian). Reading the log I found this message:
"Catalog file on image/volume is too badly fragmented"
It concerns the source. I tried to fix the disk from errors, but no difference. Any suggestion?

Thanx
Marco

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

john — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 08:41:28 -0000

15 hours for a 1TB->2TB migration

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

elektek — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:55:40 -0000

i have tried to do this but the destination partition is to small. my old drive alows me to alter the size of partition but my new one doesn't. any ideas on how i can alter the size of the parts to my new hd without erasing the data..i have just spent 2 days transferring filesand don't want to loose any more time... help please

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

Atlanta Yankee — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:38:30 -0000

I had a similar error today but finally got it to work. Not sure if this will help you but it's the only thing I did differently.

I had initially selected my original HD (in the left column) and clicked on the Restore tab not thinking it would make a difference since you drag and drop the source and destination anyway. When that scenario provided the error, I instead selected the new HD in the list at the left and used the Restore tab from there. Probably a silly mistake but hope that is all it is for you.

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

trcdarker — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 12:21:01 -0000

I followed your tutorial to the letter, but got the error message:

"Could not restore - Operation not permitted"

I am transferring data from a 250GB external harddrive to a new completely zero'ed 1TB Iomega external harddrive, this is what my log says:

2009-12-27 17:12:32 +0000: Restore Disk
2009-12-27 17:12:32 +0000: Source: “Darkers HD”
2009-12-27 17:12:32 +0000: Destination: “Untitled”
2009-12-27 17:12:32 +0000: Erase Destination: No
2009-12-27 17:12:32 +0000:
2009-12-27 17:12:32 +0000: Starting Restore…
2009-12-27 17:12:32 +0000: Validating target...
2009-12-27 17:12:32 +0000: done
2009-12-27 17:12:32 +0000: Validating source...
2009-12-27 17:12:32 +0000: done
2009-12-27 17:12:32 +0000: Validating sizes...
2009-12-27 17:12:32 +0000: done
2009-12-27 17:12:32 +0000: Copying
2009-12-27 17:14:01 +0000: could not copy /Volumes/Untitled/Backups.backupdb/Mac/2009-04-15-054708/Macintosh HD/Applications/Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional/Acrobat Distiller 7.0.app/Contents/Frameworks... Operation not permitted
2009-12-27 17:14:01 +0000: Bom copy exited with error 1
2009-12-27 17:14:01 +0000:
2009-12-27 17:14:01 +0000: Could not restore - Operation not permitted
2009-12-27 17:14:02 +0000: Could not restore - Operation not permitted
2009-12-27 17:14:02 +0000:

Any help would be appreciated.

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

Justin Scott — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:37:06 -0000

click the level below the actual drive, then you can drag it over.

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

msarcher — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:53:43 -0000

my old drive will not stick in the source line? I have tried dragging it over and I dont get a plus sign??
I unmounted, remounted, turned off TM etc? Advice?

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

phillipduran — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:25:53 -0000

I bought a 500g drive to copy my 500g Time Machine drive to. My source partition was 499.97 Gb and the destination was 499.71 :-( . Because of this the destination drive wasn't large enough to take the restore even though I only had 450Gb of data on the source drive. It wouldn't allow me to continue with the restore. What I was able to do is click on the source drive and adjust the partition size down to 499.31 which is now small enough to fit on the new drive.

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

JimInHolland — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 02:26:01 -0000

"And that should have read BOAT not BOOT..."

If you're canadian, it works just as well. ;)

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

lairdo — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:50:22 -0000

Thanks so much for this write up and for including the problems section which I needed. Took the afternoon to copy over, but everything appears fine.

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

amplifryer — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:01:40 -0000

I'm upgrading a 12" 1.33 G4 iBook with a new 160GB drive and (before I read this) started by formatting the drive with the disk utility and now I've got time machine sending all the old data to the new drive (connected with a USB cable to a portable drive case). My plan is to take the new disk with all the backed up stuff and install it right into the computer. After reading your article, it seems like I should have just put the blank disk in the computer and used the OSX disk to reinstall everything from another time machine drive. Whatd'ya think? Am I wasting my time?

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

John Baughman — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 02:08:11 -0000

And that should have read BOAT not BOOT...

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

John Baughman — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 02:07:18 -0000

Microsoft missed the boot on disk formats!

After remounting and selecting Erase Destination, it's working! Awesome, I love Macs!

Thanks for the tutorial!

Re: How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

Seb — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:20:38 -0000

That was easy - thanks for the step by step tutorial, it works great!!!!