As someone who has used Apple’s Time Machine backup feature (along with CarbonCopyCloner) for many years, I’ve grown to trust and rely on the feature as an important part of my backup regimen. I’ve also learned, however, that it is all but inevitable that at some point, you will run out of space on your backup drive and/or decide to move to a faster, smaller, or better backup drive. When that time comes (and believe me, it will), you may find yourself wondering how to transfer your Time Machine backups to a new drive.
The process isn’t quite as straightforward as transferring most types of files – but fortunately, Apple has provided detailed instructions on how to get the job done! Although it does take several steps and a fair bit of time, transferring your Time Machine backups is a fairly simple process.
Here’s how it’s done (via Apple’s support article):
To have the existing Time Machine backups on the new backup drive, follow these steps:
Connect the new backup drive to your Mac.
Open Disk Utility (located in the Utilities folder).
In Disk Utility, select the new drive’s icon, then make sure it has a GUID partition, and is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), which you can check on the “Format:” line at the bottom of the window.
If it is not formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), reformat the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a GUID partition. If you do not know how, see the steps in this article.
Note: Back up any important data on the drive before you format it.
Open a new Finder window. In the Finder sidebar, click the icon of the new backup drive and choose Get Info from the File menu or press Command-I (⌘-I)
Make sure “Ignore ownership on this volume” at the bottom of the “Sharing & Permissions:” section is not checked.
Open the Time Machine pane in System Preferences. Choose Time Machine > Open Time Machine Preferences…
Slide the Time Machine switch to Off.
Open a new Finder window. In the Finder sidebar, click the icon of the current backup drive.
Open a new Finder window. In the Finder sidebar, click the icon of the new backup drive.
Drag the folder “Backups.backupdb” on the current backup drive to the root level of the new backup drive. Note: If the drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended but without journaling, OS X may state that “the volume has the wrong case sensitivity” to be used as a back up disk.
Enter an administrator name and password, then click OK to start the copying process. This may take some time to complete because all the backups will be copied.
After the copy has completed, open Time Machine preferences and click “Select Disk…”.
Select the new backup drive, then click “Use Backup Disk”.
That’s all there is too it! Good luck – and as always, make sure to keep your Mac backed up at all times to avoid data loss!
For more helpful tips, check out our full collection of tutorials by visiting our How-To category!
