Home Forums Mac Software Mac Operating Systems Moving Time Machine Folder to New Drive

When I tried to use Silverkeeper to backup my Time Machine in order to transfer the information, it couldn't do it. So I tried to run Disk Utility on the Time Machine Drive and the fever bar stayed at 29 minutes to go for a very long time while it was trying to check multi-linked files. It won't let me just move the folder because it says I do not have permissions enabled.

I had to buy a larger backup drive since the hard drive got changed and the drive doesn't have enough room to begin a backup on a the new installation.

I know nothing from Time Machine, but from the sound of things, you may find How to migrate Time Machine backups to a new drive helpful.

Turn off automatic backups in Time Machine's preferences, and then in Finder drag the Backups.backupdb folder from the root of the old volume to the root of the new volume. As of 10.6, Finder understands what you're doing, and will do all the right things. Specifically, it will:

• Ask you to validate with an admin name and password (without which you will not have permission to make the copy),
• Enable owners on the destination volume (because Time Machine will insist)
• Copy all the files, correctly preserving ownership, permissions, metadata, and all the hard links.

When it's done copying, open Time Machine's preferences again, and tell it to start backing up to the new volume.

That's all there is to it. (And no, you do not need to mess with "copy exactly". Finder will already do that.)

As soon as I drag the folder over from the old time machine drive now, it says right away it can't be done because I don't have ownership enabled. How do I do this?

From Time Machine: How to transfe...p drive:

Dd that, now it counts number of files to copy and then fever bar just rolls at:

Copying 2,469,556 items to "New Time Machine"
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ etc.
Zero KB o 713.09 GB - Estimating time remaining...

Been about 2 hours now.

Do you have any antivirus software? I had a similar problem with TM and resolved it by disabling Intego VirusBarrier. I re-enabled it afterward and didn't have a problem. However, I have since uninstalled IVB.

Well, I went to sleep, and when I woke up this morning it was done. BTW, I find Sophos is a great AV. It is free for individual users and caught two viruses in the past six months that were not active yet but were embedded in email attachments and got rid of them. Thanks all!

This is the continuing saga of my topic "System Panic Screen Blackout". When I reformatted the new internal drive after Apple installed the new (refurbished) logic board, my Time Machine drive did not have room to do a new backup. Both my external drives are partitioned in order to take out the partition on either drive, I had to buy a third one. (I will leave the newest one as Time Machine.) Now I can bring back this computer with the used logic board and begin my effort to get the whole computer replaced. It still gets very, very hot.

This issue may have been a problem with the replaced logic board because I remember now I had a previous problem with the other two drives in that if I dismounted both partitions of one drive by placing them in the trash it, I still got the message that the drive had not been dismounted when I turned it off...

ok, I got the old Time Machine files to transfer to the new drive. New problem: When I begin to use the new 1 TB drive as my new Time Machine, instead of picking up where it left off, it creates a new folder and no longer calculates the changes, it writes a whole new file and that fills up the new drive. Is there any way to force it to calculate the changes? The information on my new internal drive is not that different from the latest backup I made prior to the computer failing.

Ah, I see you replaced your prior internal drive. Time Machine sees that as a new disk (which it is) and backs it up in its entirety. It's doing this because you replaced the internal drive, not because you cloned the backup.

I also see you're on 10.6.8. In 10.7 Lion and later, there is a command-line tool named tmutil that can be used to, among other things, tell Time Machine that a "new" disk is really (a clone of) an old one.

But on 10.6 Snow Leopard, it takes serious hacking skills to accomplish the same result. Your best bet is to accept that TM is going to copy everything over again. It'll take hours, but TM will only have to do it once, and fortunately your 1TB drive should have room. Future backups will be as parsimonious as usual.

What a mess! I reformatted the drive and retransferred the old TM folder onto it. Then I started Time Machine. It spent all night and most of today 'excluding items.' Yay, I thought. Now it is still stuck on writing the full contents of my hard drive onto the TM drive and has used up everything except 2.16 GB and is just sitting there... Won't give me an option to clear old backups and won't let me delete the older ones by hand, it won't 'allow' that.

Backing up 395,676 items
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ etc
275.95 GB of 275.95 GB

Well, actually, it will.

Look in the Backups.backupdb folder. There will be one subfolder for each "computer" that it backed up. What you're looking to see is whether it thinks the computer you have is the same or different from the computer you had when you made the old backups. (A motherboard change may make it seem like a new computer.)

If there's only one "computer" being backed up, take Time Machine into its "star field" view, as if you were going to restore files. Go back in time until you're looking at the old disk. On (the backup of) that old disk, navigate to the /System folder. In the toolbar of the Finder window is an "Action" menu. (Icon looks like a gear.) Pull down that menu, and notice the item that says Delete all backups of "System". Selecting that option will delete all backups of that /System folder, the one that was on the old disk. (Backups of the new /System folder, the one on the new disk, will be unaffected.) TM will churn away for much longer than it seems like it should take, but eventually it will free up a big bunch of disk space. Do the same with /Applications. Between them, /System and /Applications account for about two thirds of the files on a typical system. (But not two thirds of the disk space.) If you're really ambitious, you can have Finder show invisible files, and then delete /bin, /sbin, and /usr from the backups. Delete anything else you're sure you will never need to restore from that long ago.

As an extreme measure, you could delete all backups of the old disk itself. That'll free up the most space, but I'm trying to preserve the backup history of your old documents, in case you want to get any of them back.

Be absolutely sure you're deleting stuff from the backups of the old disk, not from the backups of the new disk. To do that, be sure you've gone back in time to before the new disk appeared on the scene.


If, when you look inside Backups.backupdb, you see two "computers", ask TM to "browse other backups". To do that, either click and hold on TM's dock icon, or option-click on TM's menulet, and select the backup from long ago. (If, as is likely, both "computers" have the same name, you'll have to guess which one. The one currently being used for backups will have a TM icon, so probably pick the other. Once you're in the star field, check the available dates to make sure you've got the old backup, not the new one.) Step back in time at least one step, then proceed as described above to delete backups of /System, /Applications, etc. (If you don't step back in time, you're looking at the current running system. You don't want to (and can't) delete files from your running system.)

It's possible your Finder windows don't have an Action menu in their toolbar. They do by default, but it's removable. If you don't have one, then in Finder go to View→Customize Toolbar..., and put it back. You need to do that in Finder, not in TM's star field.

What's in the Action menu depends on where you are. The "Delete all backups of ..." option is only in the menu when you're in TM's star field. Another option you will see in the menu is "Delete this backup". By "this backup", they mean "the snapshot taken at this time", which typically won't free up much disk space.

That's really interesting. I did not know how TM works exactly, but that makes sense. Are you an programmer?

It also sounds extremely scary. What if there was something in the old system folder that I wanted, it's gone, right? Boy, with all the cranking it was doing for a day, I was sure it was doing something like that, but it gave up I guess. It even put an 'in progress' folder on my desktop so it looked like it was using my internal HD as a kind of scratch disk, but all that is in there are copies of items in my desktop folder.

I'm going to need a 'bigger boat' if I really want to be careful, I guess. Grrrr... What a mess Apple has created for me and money on a new backup now, too.

Thanks for the extremely detailed explanation. I'm copying and pasting it for future reference.

There can't be. /System belongs to Apple. Its contents depend entirely on the OS version you're running (and possibly on the make/model of your computer). There are no user-servicable parts inside. You should never add/remove/modify anything inside /System. You will therefore never need to restore anything inside /System. (Remember, you've also got an up-to-date copy of /System on your current boot drive, and you have a backup of that. We're not removing your only backup of /System.)

/Applications is not so clear-cut. If you installed any third-party apps before the troubles began, and haven't re-installed them since, your only copy is in that old backup of /Applications. Presumably, however, you got those apps from somewhere, and can get them again from the same place. Unless you created them, you never had the only copy.

What you're really concerned about is keeping backups of your original creations. Those should be in your home folder, inside /Users, and the instructions I gave you carefully preserved your old backup of /Users.

I got a 2 TB drive, but will still do what you said because it will fill up quickly while I use a stand-in computer to go to court to try to settle the business with this one. Got my old Time Machine back-ups on it last night and am now doing my first one for this machine.

Problem!

Now I have data from former Time Machine drive moved onto new 2 TB (using command> all>command copy>command paste) and started the new Time Machine backups, but it will only 'see' the new ones. Help!

Thanks Ganbustein. TMUTIL sent me to Pondini.org:

http://pondini.org/TM/B6.html

Yes, you really know your TM, it could have been done when I got the new board and drive with TMUTIL, but I don't do Terminal. I'll leave that to 'fast learners'. (Punctuation inside period this time Gan ) This 'slolerner' can get to the former backup easily enough using the option key like you said. When I have time, I will start deleting system folders, etc. I see how it works now. I'm cool, thanks all.

Oh, boy. I zero-ed out the other two external drives, including the old time machine drive while getting rid of their partitions and moving other stuff onto them, when I run Time Machine on the third external drive, the new TM drive, it tells me there isn't enough room for a backup. When the other two drives are mounted, even tho they are excluded in the backup, it says I need 1.14 TB to do it. When I unmount and turn off the other drives, it says I need 265.72 GB to do a backup, and deleted now it deleted all the backups from the computer that were done after the internal drive was replaced.

BTW, I am able to delete backups off the previous TM backups section by adding the delete button to the menu bar at the top. It works, but it will not solve this problem.