How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk
Posted on Jul 26, 2008 by Stephen
Uh oh, after this backup I'll only have a few GB left on my Time Machine backup drive!
Well, that happened pretty quickly! After upgrading the internal hard drive on my MacBook Pro to 320 GB, I moved the 120 GB disk Apple shipped with the machine to my Verbatim SmartDisk FireWire+USB enclosure to use as a Time Machine backup target. Despite applying some tricks to reduce the amount of data backed up by Time Machine, I filled up the 120 GB drive pretty quickly indeed! So I decided to swap the 160 GB drive from my Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini USB drive into the (faster) Verbatim FireWire enclosure to give Time Machine some (temporary) breathing room.
It turns out that you can move Time Machine backups easily, with included OS X tools, and without breaking anything. My old backups are still visible, and I have another 40 GB to work with. Read on for the details!
This post is part of my series focused on Apple OS X tips and tricks.
The Windup
In order to effectively use Time Machine, you really need a backup target disk larger than the one you’re backing up. But I didn’t have that. I was able to prune out 28 GB of data in my home directory that didn’t need to be backed up, along with 22 GB of operating system data, by tuning Time Machine. Although my lappie has over 300 GB of storage space, Time Machine only has to back up 66 GB of it – Windows Vista has 55 GB, 50 GB doesn’t need to be backed up, and the rest is empty.
The little 111 GB (usable) backup drive that I created when I stuffed the Fujitsu MH2120BH disk that came with my MacBook Pro into the vacated Verbatim enclosure that donated its Western Digital WD3200BEVT to my laptop was enough for a while. But this wouldn’t be enough for long: Time Machine currently takes up 103 GB to store a month and a half worth of my system backups.
Since I already had a 160 GB Maxtor OneTouch Mini 4 USB drive sitting around half full for Windows backups, I decided to swap the disk drive units between enclosures to get an extra 40 GB for Time Machine. It turns out the Maxtor used a Seagate ST9160821AS drive, by the way.
Why not leave the drives in place and just use the Maxtor for Time Machine? Three reasons:
- FireWire is substantially faster than USB 2.0 (as I’ll show in a future post)
- My MacBook has just one USB port that would work with the Maxtor, and I like to leave the Time Machine drive plugged in when I’m home, which would leave me with a hub (which I don’t have) or only a single USB port for everything else
- I’m a nut and love to rip things apart and tinker with them
Most people will probably want to just go out and buy a bigger disk.
Moving Your Time Machine Data
Let’s say you have an old (full) Time Machine disk and a new (empty) one and you’d like to preserve your old backups. Here’s how to move the Time Machine data without losing anything:
- Turn off Time Machine with the big switch in the Time Machine System Preferences panel.
- Eject the old Time Machine disk, unplug it, and re-insert it to force it to re-mount as a regular drive.
- Use Disk Utility to wipe the new drive completely. Give it a single partition (I chose MBR since it’s a removable drive, but it shouldn’t matter Apple recommends using GUID partition maps to avoid Time Machine trouble!) and a new empty filesystem. Time Machine requires the filesystem to be of the type, “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”.
- Give the new drive a unique name so you can keep them straight when you’re copying. I recommend calling it “New Time Machine Drive” or something equally unambiguous. I called mine “Verbatim 160″ (even though it was still in the Maxtor case), while my old drive was called “Verbatim”.
- Plug both drives into your Mac. You should see both in the Disk Utility sidebar. See my example at right, showing both “Verbatim” and “Verbatim 160″.
- Select the “Restore” tab in Disk Utility. This built-in OS X application can create a perfect block copy of your Time Machine drive, no third-party tools required.
- Drag your old drive from the sidebar to the “Source” box.
- Drag your new drive from the sidebar to the “Destination” box.
- Click “Restore” and observe the warning – this will copy all data from your old Time Machine volume to the new drive, destroying its contents!
- Wait a long while (mine took 4 hours) as the copy and verification progresses.
- Once it’s done, unplug the old drive and turn Time Machine back on. Make sure that it located the data on the new drive by clicking the Enter Time Machine item in the dock and looking at your old data.
- Consider telling Spotlight not to index this new drive or at least the “Backups.backupdb” folder.
- Once you’re satisfied that the new drive is working, you may want to use the old drive for something else. If so, turn Time Machine off again, plug in only the old drive, and erase it with Disk Utility. Don’t switch back and forth between the two Time Machine drives or you will become hopelessly confused!
OS X's Disk Utility has the ability to do a block copy of data between different-sized disks
Aah, that's better - 50 GB of breathing room!
So there you have it! Move your Time Machine backup data with ease, using only OS X’s Disk Utility! This tool is amazingly good, making me wonder why anyone would need a third-party product.
Update: See Rolfje’s blog for streamlined Time Machine migration steps.
Problems
If the Restore process reports “Could not restore – operation not permitted“, you have to eject the Time Machine drive and re-mount it after you turn off Time Machine (see step 2).
If it still doesn’t work, try a reboot.
If it still still doesn’t work, try checking the “Erase destination” box in Disk Utility. This forces a block-level copy rather than just copying files.
Yes, FireWire is Faster Than USB | Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat
Jul 30th, 2008
[...] swapping out disk drives (first to upgrade the internal drive in my MacBook Pro and later to give Time Machine more room), I took some quick performance snapshots with xbench and showed that, depending on I/O type, [...]
A Bigger TimeMachine without Changing History « Rolfje’s blog
Sep 7th, 2008
[...] to be able to travel about a year back in time, I bought a 1TB USB disk. Stephen Foskett wrote a great article about how he migrated his TimeMachine backup, but it’s lengthy and misses one essential [...]
ampressman
Feb 19th, 2009
Great advice – thanks. In my case, going from a 500 GB drive to a 2 TB drive, it took the Disk Utility seven (!!) hours to copy and and verify the data. Yipes. But all worked fine after that. I wrote it up on my blog at http://gravitationalpull.net/wp/?p=716
Microdermabrasion Machines
Feb 26th, 2009
Good advice. Mac OSX rocks.
Seb
Jun 21st, 2009
That was easy – thanks for the step by step tutorial, it works great!!!!
John Baughman
Jun 22nd, 2009
Microsoft missed the boot on disk formats!
After remounting and selecting Erase Destination, it's working! Awesome, I love Macs!
Thanks for the tutorial!
John Baughman
Jun 22nd, 2009
And that should have read BOAT not BOOT…
amplifryer
Jul 13th, 2009
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?
lairdo
Jul 19th, 2009
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.
Jim
Sep 27th, 2009
“And that should have read BOAT not BOOT…”
If you're canadian, it works just as well.
phillipduran
Nov 12th, 2009
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.
msarcher
Nov 30th, 2009
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?
Justin Scott
Dec 15th, 2009
click the level below the actual drive, then you can drag it over.
Justin Scott
Dec 15th, 2009
click the level below the actual drive, then you can drag it over.
trcdarker
Dec 27th, 2009
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/AdobeACE.framework/AdobeACE; 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.
Atlanta Yankee
Jan 3rd, 2010
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.
If Disaster Strikes, My Data Will Live On In My ioSafe Time Machine « David Chiu
Jan 15th, 2010
[...] suggest using Super Duper, Carbon Copy Cloner or Disk Utility to move a Time Machine backup from one drive to another. After spending an hour trying to use Disk Utility to copy the old Time Machine disk I gave up. I [...]
elektek
Jan 21st, 2010
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
john
Feb 21st, 2010
15 hours for a 1TB->2TB migration
marcovalente
Apr 6th, 2010
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
Robb
Apr 8th, 2010
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.
r4s
Jun 14th, 2010
Well, how do I move time machine backups from one NAS to another NAS?
Quiroulebamboule
Aug 20th, 2010
great tutorial Stephen! Works perfectly for me the 1st time! thx!