OK, techies, what's the best way to migrate a MacOS Time Machine backup to a new drive? I outgrew my old drive (8TB) and want to move the backup history to my new drive (24TB).
#TechSupport#MacOS #Backup
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@stshank Do not migrate.
Tell macOS to forget about the old drive, otherwise it will keep snapshots around waiting for the old drive to reappear. Throw the old drive in a drawer, you can always get files from it in an emergency.
Start fresh with a new drive.
@stshank just clone it too the new disk and let it run overnight.
Or start with a fresh backup.
Update: kind of a moot point since my backup got so big it overwrote all the history anyway. So I'm just starting from scratch with a new backup.
@stshank Starting from scratch is certainly the easiest.
Most importantly, as I'm sure you realise, you "add" the new drive and retain the old drive in your TM settings, that way you get to keep your history for as long as needed.
On the third hand you can periodically plug in the old drive to have redundant backups, even if the history is pretty truncated.
My primary TM disk is a network drive, but my secondary is a USB disk which I plug in once a month and otherwise keep stored in a safe place.
@stshank I’d say probably Super Duper! but you could probably do it from the command line with dd(1) as well
@darkuncle Thank you. I'm a little surprised there isn't an Apple support page. Seems like it ought to be a routine if unusual action for MacOS — surely thousands of people have gone before me and talked about it to some degree? But it's all cloning and permissions kinds of stuff — doable but PITA and not user friendly.
@stshank
100% concur. It feels like a deep "miss" in UX. The whole purpose of preserving arbitrary file-history depth relative to total available storage, without being able to move that depth to larger storage, is fundamentally broken. Since this used to be possible pre-APFS, I suspect it's a use case that was missed (since you can use any drive with Time Machine).
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