Transfer your Time Machine backups to a new drive with this guide

Time Machine is an excellent tool for backing up your Mac. But if your external Time Machine drive runs out of space or starts to fail, you might need to transfer those backups elsewhere. In this post, we’ve shown you how to do just that.

Time Machine saves snapshots of your Mac from the past days, weeks, months or even years. If you want to keep those snapshots you need to transfer them to a new drive using the process we’ve described below.

WARNING: Moving your Time Machine backups can be a very time-consuming process. It took me four hours to move 250 GB of backups to a new drive. Other users have waited days for their transfers to finish.

Quick Tips

Follow these tips to get started quickly or read the full instructions further down in the post:

1. Ensure your new drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a GUID Partition Map scheme.
2. Get Info for your new drive in Finder and turn off the option to ‘Ignore ownership on this volume.’
3. Temporarily turn off Time Machine backups in System Preferences.
4. Open Finder and drag the ‘Backups’ folder from your old drive to your new one.
5. Turn on Time Machine again, with your new drive as the destination.

Related:

• How to set up and use macOS and OS X Time Machine
• Fix Time Machine when it freezes on ‘Preparing Backup’
• How do you delete Time Machine backups from the Trash?
• PSA: Don’t convert your Time Machine drive from HFS+ to APFS

Can I transfer my Time Machine backups to a new drive?

Time Machine is more complicated than your typical backup, but you can still move all your existing Time Machine snapshots to a new drive relatively easily. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to this so you have a backup of your backup drive. After all…

“Two is one and one is none.”

Once your Time Machine backups are on the new drive, it behaves exactly like the old one did. That means you can make new backups or you can open Time Machine itself to recover lost files from last week, last month, or even last year, depending on when your backups started.

Transferring your Time Machine backups to a new drive is a great idea if your old drive is failing, if you need more storage, or if you want to archive your backups.

But sometimes people spend time transferring backups when they didn’t need to. We’ve detailed a couple of reasons for that below.

You don’t need to transfer your backups to use Time Machine with another Mac

If you want to back up a second Mac to your external drive, you can do it alongside your existing Time Machine backups. There’s no need to clear out the drive and start from scratch. Simply connect it to a new Mac and tell Time Machine to use it for backups.

Provided there’s enough space for the backup, Time Machine works out all the kinks and creates a new folder for the second Mac. It keeps all your files and folders separate and knows which folder to recover data from for each Mac.

You don’t need to transfer your backups to store other files on the drive

If you need to store other files on your external drive, you can do it directly alongside your backups. Once again, there’s no need to transfer the backups and clear your drive. 

The operating software on your Mac doesn’t let Time Machine overwrite any files it didn’t create. So you can add folders or files alongside the Backups folder without worrying about Time Machine deleting them.

How do I transfer Time Machine backups to a new drive?

You can move your backups using copy and paste in Finder, but first you need to check the format and permissions on your new drive. The entire process can take a very long time, depending on how much data you have and whether your external drive is healthy or not. 

Make sure your Mac remains powered on and awake the whole time.

Step 1. Connect both drives to your computer

You need to connect your existing Time Machine drive and your new one to your Mac at the same time. Depending on how many USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt ports your Mac has, you may need to use a hub or adapter to achieve this.

After connecting both drives, open Finder to make sure they’re both mounted. You should be able to see them in the sidebar under Locations. If you don’t see a Locations section, go to Finder > Preferences > Sidebar and turn it on.

If one of the drives is missing, check its connection and power supply or contact the manufacturer for technical assistance.

Step 2. Check the format of your new drive

Before moving anything onto your new drive, you need to make sure it’s set to the right format for Time Machine. If it isn’t, you need to erase it completely and reformat it. We’ve explained how to check or reformat your drive below.

How do I check the format of my external drive?

1. Open System Information from the Utilities folder in Applications.
2. Select Storage from the sidebar, within the Hardware menu.
3. Select your new external drive from the top of the window.
4. Look through the information to find the File System and the Partition Map Type, ensure they match what’s written below:
   1. File System: Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or Journaled HFS+
   2. Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
5. If it doesn’t match, reformat your drive to work with Time Machine.

How do I reformat my external drive?

If your external drive isn’t compatible with Time Machine, follow these instructions to reformat it. Otherwise, click here to skip to the next step.

Reformatting your external drive erases all the content on it. You need to manually remove anything on your external drive you want to keep before continuing.

Follow these instructions to reformat your external drive:

1. Open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder in Applications.
2. Find your new drive from the sidebar and select the parent drive.
3. Click Erase.
4. Choose a name for your drive and set the following settings:
   1. Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
   2. Scheme: GUID Partition Map.
5. Click Erase and wait for the process to complete.

   

Step 3. Adjust the permissions on your new drive

Before macOS lets you copy any data to or from your Time Machine backups, you need to change the permissions on your new drive. This is easy to do from the Get Info window in Finder.

How do I change the permissions on my new drive for Time Machine?

1. Open Finder.
2. Select your new drive from the sidebar, under Locations. 
3. In the menu bar, go to File > Get Info. 
4. Open the Sharing & Permissions section.
5. Click the padlock and enter your administrator password to allow changes.
6. Turn off the option to ‘Ignore ownership on this volume.’

   

Step 4. Temporarily turn off Time Machine backups

You don’t want Time Machine to update your backups whilst you’re transferring them to a new drive. That’s why you need to temporarily turn it off.

Of course, this means your Mac can’t backup for the duration of the transfer, which takes several hours. Make sure you have a recent backup before starting.

How do I turn off Time Machine backups?

1. From the menu bar, go to  > System Preferences > Time Machine. 
2. Turn off the option to ‘Back Up Automatically.’ 
3. On older versions of macOS, you may need to click an On/Off button.

   

Don’t forget to return to these preferences to turn Time Machine on again after the transfer is complete.

Step 5. Transfer your Time Machine backups to the new drive

This is as simple as copying and pasting the correct folder from your existing Time Machine drive to the new one. However, as we’ve already mentioned, once you start the transfer it could take a long time to complete.

Don’t begin this process unless you’re happy to keep your Mac powered on and connected to both drives for at least the next 24 hours.

How do I transfer Time Machine backups to a new drive?

1. Open two new Finder windows: one for each drive.
2. Find the ‘Backups.backupdb’ folder on your existing Time Machine drive. If it doesn’t exist, find a file ending with ‘.sparesbundle’ instead.
3. Drag and drop that folder or file to your new drive. Alternatively, use copy and paste from the Edit menu.
4. If prompted, enter your administrator password.
5. Wait for the transfer to complete.

   

Step 6. Select your new drive in Time Machine

Once the transfer is complete, you can start using your new drive to make new Time Machine backups. But first, you need to turn Time Machine on again and select your new drive for the next backup.

How do I select my new drive for Time Machine backups?

1. From the menu bar, go to  > System Preferences > Time Machine.
2. Turn on ‘Back Up Automatically’ or move the switch to ‘On.’
3. Click ‘Select Disk…’ and select your new drive, then click ‘Use Disk.’

   

When you’re finished, don’t move your old Time Machine backups to the Trash using Finder because they might get stuck. You should use Disk Utility to erase your drive instead. 

Let us know in the comments how long it took you to transfer your Time Machine backups to a new drive. We’d also love to know why you needed to move the backups in the first place.

Dan Helyer( Senior Writer )

Dan is a freelance writer based in South West England.

He spent two years supervising repairs as a Genius Admin for Apple Retail and uses that knowledge to keep our troubleshooting guides up to date.

Long before that, Dan turned to Apple products from a musical background. Having owned iPods for years, he bought a MacBook to learn sound recording and production. It was using those skills that he gained a first-class Bachelor of Science in Sound Technology.