If you're like me after a year or two you may have outgrown your Time Machine backup and with Hard Drive prices dropping it's time to get a bigger hard disk to host your Time Machine backup. But starting a new time machine backup on a new hard disk means you lose the continuity with your old backups. Thankfully you can move an existing Time Machine backup from one hard drive to another. Here's how.
1. Format the new Hard Drive as OSX Extended (Journaled) and make sure ‘ignore file permissions on this volume' is off.
Now we can copy our files over from the old Time Machine backup to our new one. Head to the old drive and you'll see a folder called 'backups.backupd.' Drag this entire folder over to your new drive. But if I select the new disk in Time Machine Preferences - which is contrary to Apple's instructions - it immediately begins performing a new Time Machine backup which is not what I want, because that then creates a new Backup folder on the drive. I'm trying to copy my old backups from an old drive. Drag the Backups.backupdb from your old Time Machine Backup to your new Drive. (Yes it's that simple and it actually works – it's Apple's recommended way of doing it!) This may take literally a couple of days. In this free lesson from the full tutorial on Mac Backup see how to transfer your current Time Machine Backup to a new hard drive. This can be very useful wh. People also searched for can a backup Mac drive be installed on a different Mac, can i take a mac time machine backup and use it on a different macbook pro, back up mac on another mac, nu vot, will a backup of one mac restore a different one, backup macbook air and restore on another macbook air, backup a macbook using another macbook, copy.
2. Turn off Time Machine
3. Drag the Backups.backupdb from your old Time Machine Backup to your new Drive. (Yes it's that simple and it actually works – it's Apple's recommended way of doing it!) This may take literally a couple of days.
4. Turn on Time machine and select your new drive.
You can read how to do this step by step in an article by Apple here: Transfer Time Machine Backups.
There's also a good article about this on c-net. They suggest you use the ‘Copy Exactly' feature but I did it without this (the way Apple suggested) and it worked fine.
Copy Time Machine Backup To New Driver
Hi Gary and all, thanks for the zillions useful information on your website. I'm a PC user willing to switch soon so I'm gathering info before doing the big step.
What happens when a Time Machine backup disk gets full ? Is there a way to connect another (bigger) disk to the Mac then move the current backup to the new disk, let Time Machine use the new disk, and recycle the old disk ?
Or, when switching Time Machine to another disk, it implies restarting a new backup from scratch, which also implies I will loose the whole history of change I made to my files ?
Thanks and keep up the good work !
—–
Alex from Brussels Belgium