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August 29, 2008 12:30 PM PDT
How-To: Migrate Time Machine to a new drive.
Users may wish to change their hard drive configurations for convenience in workflow, adding a new drive, or just for the sake of changing things up. In many cases, users may wish to migrate their Time Machine backups to a new, larger drive, but Apple does not provide a good way to do this.
In order to change the Time Machine database over to a new drive, users cannot just copy the files manually, but instead must use a cloning software package to mirror the current TM drive over to the new one. The procedure is very straightforward, as follows:
- Obtain a version of Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper cloning software packages. (NOTE: It may be possible to use Disk Utility's "Restore" function for this, but these software packages have been known to work well for cloning drives.)
- Turn OFF Time Machine and deselect the backup drive in Time Machine's preferences.
- Connect the new drive and ensure it is mounted and available on the Desktop (formatting with Disk Utility does not matter, unless the drive cannot be accessed).
- In the cloning software, select the current Time Machine drive as the source, and clone it directly to the newly mounted drive. This might take a while, depending on the amount of data on the drive and the connection speed.
- For convenience, change the name of the old drive and then ensure the new drive has the same name as the old drive (ie, if the old drive was named "My Backups", ensure the new drive has that name). The cloning software should take care of this. Temporarily unmount (eject) the old drive as a safeguard to ensure it is not accessed by the system.
- With the new drive mounted, open the Time Machine preferences and select the new, cloned drive. Then ensure everything is working by manually starting a backup instance, and invoke Time Machine to ensure old backups are accessible.
- When everything checks out, mount the old drive and use Disk Utility to erase or partition it as is desired.
While I haven't tried it, I think that CCC would work fine, as it's just an rsync GUI, and offers bit-for-bit cloning.
Actually it provides only file-level cloning or block level if you have two identical partitions. It does not do bit copying.
I'm no expert at this but it's my understanding that basic cloning of a TM volume will not work because of problems associated with TM's use of hard links. The SuperDuper! people claim that it took quite a bit of effort on their part to figure out how to correctly clone a TM backup drive without breaking the links.
Now, it's quite possible CCC 3.1.1 also clones it correctly, but I haven't seen any verification of that. Until one sees a confirmation that it works such that the cloned TM drive works like the original, then I would test it out before relying on it.
I could not clone using SuperDuper! 2.5 and their support person told me that it is not always possible to clone a TM disk.
I'm afraid that the advice given in this thread may not be correct and that it may lead to trouble for some!
One thing this article fails to mention is how the new drive must be formatted if you want the drive to BOOT the machine.
Note: most external and internal drives you buy, say from Fry's or online, come formated with Master Boot Record partician (windows format) or the old Apple Partician Map scheme.
If you are running an Intel machine, you must format the drive first with the GUID Partition Table scheme.
If you are running a PPC machine, you must format the drive with the Apple Partician Map scheme.
Instructions here: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1600
You wouldn't boot the machine from the new TM drive, and the TM setup should take care of the partitioning scheme for the drive, but it is a good precaution to ensure the partitioning scheme matches the system architecture (GUID for intel, and APM for PPC).
The other threads I've read point out the bundle format is different between direct and network attached storage. The Sparse Bundle is used for network, presumably to cut down on traffic.
If by "directly attached" you mean by direct USB or Firewire connection to the computer, then there is no sparse bundle. The "bundle" is only for a networked TM drive such as Time Capsule or USB/Ethernet connection to an Airport Extreme Base Station. At least that's my understanding. I've never found a sparse bundle for a TM backup using a drive connected directly to the computer.
Yeah, sparsebundles are used for network backups. I believe this is to help ensure integrity of the backup as well as provide some security. I dont know whether or not the sparsebundles are encrypted, but if so then that would be a decent security measure.
I could restore from the TM backup. But that takes ages from a TC (even via Gigabit), and for some reason I trust SD more than TM on this.
This can't be done because a TM backup is not bootable.
Maybe you misunderstood me. I replaced the internal drive in my MBP with a larger one (and first cloned my internal drive to another drive and then cloned it back to my new internal drive). My TM backup on a TC now thought that all my data were new and backed up the whole drive again.
My question would have been whether there is a way to avoid TM backing up everything again? I think simply booting from my Install DVD and selecting the TM backup on the TC for a restore would have achieved that (but restoring over a gigabit connection from a TC takes very long, much longer than the cloning back from a Firewire 800 drive).
I have changes Mac.
I have 2 directories on my Time Machine drive
my name Power Mac G5
my name Power Mac G5 2
How can I move the backup data from my old Mac to my new Mac ?
Thanks in advance for your help
Best
Cyril
While the procedure described here for duplicating a Time Machine backup is straightforward enough, it only works in a limited number of circumstances. And it doesn't work at all with a network drive like a Time Capsule. And, unfortunately, the Time Capsule has no FireWire port, so you cannot connect it directly to your Mac for duplication purposes. I'd call this convenience with a very big catch. As far as it goes the Time Capsule is great, but it is neither the ultimate nor an all-around solution.
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Don't anthropomorphize computers.
They hate that.
So, I do understand correctly... you want to backup a backup? If yes, I wouldn't call that ironic. ;)
- by Nick Naym August 31, 2008 1:57 PM PDT
- I'm assuming that once the migration from the "old" drive to the "new" drive has been successfully accomplished, the name of the "new" drive can be changed to whatever you wish, correct?
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