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.
Contents
- 1 Quick Tips
- 2 Can I transfer my Time Machine backups to a new drive?
- 3 How do I transfer Time Machine backups to a new drive?
- 3.1 Step 1. Connect both drives to your computer
- 3.2 Step 2. Check the format of your new drive
- 3.3 Step 3. Adjust the permissions on your new drive
- 3.4 Step 4. Temporarily turn off Time Machine backups
- 3.5 Step 5. Transfer your Time Machine backups to the new drive
- 3.6 Step 6. Select your new drive in Time Machine
- 4 Problems transferring Time Machine backups to a new drive?
- 5 Thanks for dropping by!
Quick Tips
Follow these quick tips to get started quickly on transferring your Mac’s Time Machine backup to a new drive or read the full instructions further down in the post:
- Ensure your new drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a GUID Partition Map scheme.
- Get Info for your new drive in Finder and turn off the option to ‘Ignore ownership on this volume.’
- Temporarily turn off Time Machine backups in System Preferences.
- Open Finder and drag the ‘Backups’ folder from your old drive to your new one.
- 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?
- Open System Information from the Utilities folder in Applications.
- Select Storage from the sidebar, within the Hardware menu.
- Select your new external drive from the top of the window.
- Look through the information to find the File System and the Partition Map Type, ensure they match what’s written below:
- File System: Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or Journaled HFS+
- Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
- 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:
- Open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder in Applications.
- Find your new drive from the sidebar and select the parent drive.
- Click Erase.
- Choose a name for your drive and set the following settings:
- Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
- Scheme: GUID Partition Map.
- Click Erase and wait for the process to complete.
Reformat your drive with Time Machine compatible settings.
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?
- Open Finder.
- Select your new drive from the sidebar, under Locations.
- In the menu bar, go to File > Get Info.
- Open the Sharing & Permissions section.
- Click the padlock and enter your administrator password to allow changes.
- Turn off the option to ‘Ignore ownership on this volume.’
Make sure this option is unchecked for your new Time Machine drive.
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?
- From the menu bar, go to > System Preferences > Time Machine.
- Turn off the option to ‘Back Up Automatically.’
- On older versions of macOS, you may need to click an On/Off button.
Temporarily turn off automatic backups before starting the transfer.
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?
- Open two new Finder windows: one for each drive.
- Find the ‘Backups.backupdb’ folder on your existing Time Machine drive. If it doesn’t exist, find a file ending with ‘.sparesbundle’ instead.
- Drag and drop that folder or file to your new drive. Alternatively, use copy and paste from the Edit menu.
- If prompted, enter your administrator password.
- Wait for the transfer to complete.
After preparing the transfer, Finder should give you an estimated duration.
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?
- From the menu bar, go to > System Preferences > Time Machine.
- Turn on ‘Back Up Automatically’ or move the switch to ‘On.’
- Click ‘Select Disk…’ and select your new drive, then click ‘Use Disk.’
Select your new drive and choose whether to encrypt your backups or not, which is recommended for privacy.
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.
Problems transferring Time Machine backups to a new drive?
- Make sure you log into your Mac as an administrator
- Verify that your Time Machine drive’s desktop icon does not show up as a green TM backup icon but rather the standard yellow disk icon
- Check for any case sensitivities on your drive names
- Rename the new TM backup drive the exact same as the old TM (and change to a new name after transferring your backups, if desired)
- Create a same sized partition on the new Time Machine drive as your older TM backup drive for the transfer, then resize after the transfer completes
If the process above isn’t working, consider cloning your TM backup instead using Recovery Mode (Command+R at startup) and Disk Utility. Or use a reader recommended third-party tool like SuperDuper to copy your Time Machine backup folder to a new disk.
How-to use Recovery Mode’s Disk Utility to clone a drive
- Launch your Mac in Recovery Mode and choose Disk Utility from the on-screen options
- Select the new drive in Disk Utility’s sidebar
- Choose the Restore button or go to Edit > Restore
- In the Restore from the drop-down menu choose the drive you want to clone
- Click Restore
- Once cloned, wait for Disk Utility to show the status as complete
- Tap Done
Thanks for dropping by!
Let us know in the comments how long it took you to transfer your Time Machine backups to a new drive. Or if you use a different method for transferring your TM backups to new drives.
We’d also love to know why you needed to move the backups in the first place.
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.
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Copying existing backups.backupdb folders to a brand new, properly formatted partition, on a brand new drive. left an additional 50GB of space over the size of the backups.backupdbfolder to be on the safe side.
It spends a dozen or so hours calculating the copy and then declares it has run out of space after only three of the backup sessions have actually copied.
Oddly, those backups.backupdb folders were originally copied without a problem to their current location.
It appears that the copy is expanding every hard link, file or folder, into a full duplicate of the original files.
Hi,
anybody has a solution?
Doesn’t work on 10.14.6.
Followed all steps and have the same issues like most of you:
After copying all items the finder window shows: remaining 5 seconds
But it doesn’t stop copying til copy process ends with “not enough space on target drive”.
Example: My source is tm-backup with 1 tb (drive 1 tb)
Target 2 tb empty drive.
After copying 2 tb (!!! – don’t know, what is copied after finishing all objects:) and taking hours, copy process crashes.
(Attempts with CCC, DriveImage also fail)
Thx for inputs…..
I have exactly the same problem under 10.14.6. Dragging Backups.backupd to the destination drive fills it up completely – after many hours –, and then fails.
But restoring the target disk from the TM source disk with disk utility works, and is even faster. Although this seems to be a No-No according to Apple support.
I have a faulty LaCie Mini 2TB. I’m moving my backups [per all the instructions you list above] to a brand new LaCie Mini 2TB.
The backupdb file is about 400 Gigs.
It has been backing up for 14 hours and is at 1.17TB! How did that happen? The original file is 400G and the copying is at 1.17T?
Oh, and it is stuck in perma “About 5 Seconds” left alert….It’s been like that for about 4 hours.
Should I give up?
i gave up. it had only copied over 4 folders out of maybe 50….at it was at 1.2TB…..something is very wrong. i guess i’ll try again tomorrow? maybe?
Hi DeeDee,
Yes try again. But this time, close all open apps then shut down your Mac. Wait a minute or so and power it back up–then try the transfer.
Follow these steps:
Check that the format of your new backup drive is Journaled HFS+ and the Partition Map Type is GPT (GUID Partition Table).
Set permissions on your new backup drive
Temporarily turn Time Machine off
Copy your backup data from your original drive to your new drive
Open a Finder window. In the Finder’s sidebar, click the icon of the original backup drive.
Open another new Finder window. In the Finder’s sidebar, click the icon of the new backup drive.
Drag the folder “Backups.backupdb” from the original backup drive to the top level of the new backup drive.
Enter your administrator name and password, then click OK to start the copying process.
Copying your backup data often takes a lot of time to complete so be patient on this step.
Finally, set Time Machine to use your new external drive
reformatted the disk, it shows the Journaled HFS+ and the Partition Map Type is GPT (GUID Partition Table)….set the permissions…now, when i drag and drop the backup folder to the brand new drive it says “the volume has the wrong case sensitivity for a backup”.
Hi Deedee,
No this is not fun for a Friday night’s activity. We’re so sorry that this isn’t working for you.
What macOS or OS X version are you working with? To find out, go to the Apple menu at the top-left and choose About this Mac.
There is a bug in earlier macOS versions (prior to some macOS 10.13.4 –that’s High Sierra) that causes Time Machine issues–so that could be the problem.
If Time Machine continues to fail, you could also use a third-party application like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper.
reformatted the disk again but this time with ‘case sensitive journaled’ option….trying again to copy the files over….didn’t do the Sharing and Permissions thing cause that “ignore ownership on this volume” checkbox and text no longer exists. this is fun….i like spending my friday evening doing dicey file transfers. is there any consensus on LaCie drives? maybe that’s my problem? i mean, one is failing and that’s why i have to do this in the first place.
Mojave 10.14.6
it’s still copying this morning….says it’s done 50.31 GB of 409.66….says there is 4 hours left. it’s acting exactly the same way as the last copy. my guess is that this will fail as well.
Oh gosh, what a pain! I am so sorry DeeDee. Let me look into this more for Mojave.
One thought: name the new hard drive exactly the same as the old hard drive–that might help.
yeah, the same thing happened. it copies all the files 409.66 gb and then keeps going….and the total amount of files starts increasing along with the remaining files to copy.
I canceled with both the files and the remaining files were at 500gb. so strange! I’m going to call lacie and see if they will just give me the replacement drive for free.
i’m trying SuperDuper per your suggestion. i’ll report back if/when it is done. 🙂
didn’t work in superduper either….
Hi DeeDee,
Oh my goodness, this is terrible for you! We are so sorry.
We can also try using Disk Utility to copy over your old TM drive to your new TM drive. And I’ll outline those steps below.
However, since you’ve had multiple failures with Finder and now with SuperDuper, you may want to reach out to Apple Support or SuperSuper support and see if they have additional options and/or can walk you step-by-step through their processes.
How to copy TM backups using Disk Utility
Set the permissions on your new TM drive
Choose Get Info on the new drive in Finder
Verify that Ignore ownership on this volume is unchecked
Open Disk Utility from either Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility or by restarting in Recovery Mode (Command+R keys)
Ensure again that your new TM backup drive is macOS Extended Journaled and GUID partitioned
If using Disk Utility from normal start-up (not recovery mode), turn Time Machine off
In Disk Utility select your new TM backup drive
From the Edit menu item, choose Restore…
From the next menu, choose your old Time Machine disk
Wait for Disk Utility to Restore your old TM backup to your new TM backup drive
If you used Disk Utility from Recovery Mode, restart into standard mode
Check your new drives permissions again, making sure ignore ownership on this volume is unchecked
Open Time Machine in System Preferences and select your new drive to backup to
Run a test backup to your new TM drive
Let us know if this works for you or if you contacted Apple Support or SuperDuper support.
Fingers crossed something gets this done for you!
Liz
Have you seen any cases of old backups not showing up at all with the new drive even though I finished all the steps? Does transferring just some portion of the files matter?
Hi Jen,
No, we have not heard that particular issue before.
Make sure you keep your older drive intact before you erase anything. If you haven’t already done this, shut down, wait for a few minutes and then power up your Mac.
See if after that reboot if your new Time Machine backup drive now correctly shows your TM backups.
If it still isn’t showing up, as long as you have your old TM backup drive, erase and reformat the new drive and run through the steps again. Make sure all other apps are closed and that you don’t use your Mac for other things to allow it’s full processing power to do to your TM drives.
I am having similar problems to AD, Jen & deedee.
I have tried twice.
My time machine backup is on a RAID alongside many other files, 2 computers in my DB, going back to 2014.
My Time Machine backup file is 1.62 TB. My raid is failing, so I need to move my backups. I’m attempting to put them on a 4 TB drive (USB 20 – slow).
I’ve followed Apple’s instructions to the T.
The backup takes 24 hours to prepare, 24 hours to copy, then hangs at 5 seconds.
I gave up the first time after a few hours of 5 seconds, but then I decided to try again and wait it out.
Both times, after finished, the files in my backup date from 7/2014 – 02/2015.
However, the 2nd time, when I waited it out, I got an error that copies 4 TB and I’m out of disk space. (from a 1.62 TB original backup file).
But then when I look at the files that copied, 1.62 TB shows as copied (matched original size, but 2/2015 – 2/2020 files missing!). I’ve turned off the target drive, unmounted and remounted, to no avail.
It’s 2020 and there are years worth of backups that I need to copy before my RAID permanently fails.
I would do a disk clone, but my backups are alongside files and not their own partition, and I don’t have an external drive large enough for that!
MAC OS: Mojave 10.14.6
Any suggestions?
This excellent article presents terse Apple Support articles in a clear, expanded format.
Unfortunately, under macOS Catalina, this fails.
I’m running 10.15.2. after 6 hours of file inspection (2.3 million files) phase one ends. This phase has written some info to the destination volume.
The actual file copy starts and quickly fails with a file permissions error from the finder.
I’m assuming that some further external disk permissions error must be processed.
10.5.2, same failure after 3 days… its not working. Get about 20% of the files transferred and then it fails saying I don’t have permission. Opened a case with Apple already.