I had a 160GB drive holding my Time Machine backups. Because I wanted to backup external disks, and still wanted to be able to travel about a year back in time, I bought a 1TB USB disk. Stephen Foskett wrote a great article about how he migrated his TimeMachine backup to a larger disk, but it’s lengthy and misses one essential step.
I decided to give you the short version, this blog post describes how I migrated Time Machine to the new disk without losing any data in 11 easy steps.
- Get a new, big, empty drive with a single Mac Journaled partition on it. Give it a good name so you can keep it apart from the original Time Machine drive.
- Open the Time Machine configuration screen, and turn off Time Machine.
- Unmount and remount the Time Machine drive, it should show up as an ordinary orange drive on your desktop.
- Open Disk Utility, and click the “Restore” Tab.
Drag the “TimeMachine” partition which is on the old drive to the “Source” box.- Drag the large partition on the new drive to the “Target” box.
- Select “Erase Target”. If you do not check this, the disc copy will fail. This is the essential step I mentioned earlier.
- Click “Restore”, double check the popup warning to see if you are doing the right thing and press “Restore” again. After a number of hours, depending on the speed of your USB hub and the size of the disks, you will see 2 identical drives on your desktop. The new drive should have a lot more space available. In my case, it took 5 hours to migrate 160GB to the new drive.
- Unmount the old Time Machine drive, physically disconnect it to be sure.
- Open the Time Machine configuration screen, and turn on Time Machine.
- In the Time Machine configuration screen, press “Change drive” and select the new drive. You will see the disk icon turn into the green TimeMachine drive icon. You’re done.
You can test Time Machine now by clicking the Time Machine icon in your dock and see that you still have all your history. Once you’ve verified that all your history is still there, you can use your old Time Machine drive for something else (reformat it).
You might also want to check your spotlight settings to not include your Time Machine drive for searching. Because I did not touch the volume name on the new drive, I didn’t have to change any settings, but I checked to be sure.
Bonus tip:
Now that you’ve got a large backup drive, maybe it’s time to think about backing up your external drives. Make sure all the drives you want to backup are connected, and open the Time Machine configuration screen. Click on “Options…” and remove the drives you want to back up from that list.
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Monday 2008-09-08 at 01:59 GMT +0000 |
[...] Update: See Rolfje’s blog for streamlined Time Machine migration steps. [...]
Monday 2008-09-08 at 21:35 GMT +0000 |
Hey thanks buddy! I tried it many times without the essential 7th step and then I found your post here… You saved my day
Monday 2008-09-08 at 22:00 GMT +0000 |
Glad to hear. Enjoy!
Thursday 2008-10-23 at 08:24 GMT +0000 |
thank you. merci beaucoup.
Thursday 2008-10-23 at 16:42 GMT +0000 |
[...] in Geek How to migrate Time Machine Hard Disks the right [...]
Thursday 2008-11-27 at 19:01 GMT +0000 |
Many thanks for this simple guide – made it very easy to migrate to a larger disk after I outgrew my old one.
[RICHR]
Saturday 2008-11-29 at 17:08 GMT +0000 |
Thanks for this – my new Black Friday drive is now happily waiting to be filled with back-ups galore!
Sunday 2009-01-11 at 12:44 GMT +0000 |
[...] is actually a better version of the same thing (the tip above missed one critical step) A Bigger Time Machine without Changing History Rolfje’s blog __________________ 24" Alu iMac 2.4 w/ 4GB [...]
Sunday 2009-01-11 at 12:51 GMT +0000 |
Losing, not loosing.
Sunday 2009-01-11 at 14:10 GMT +0000 |
You’re right. Fixed. Thanks!
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/losing
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/loosing
Thursday 2009-01-22 at 23:44 GMT +0000 |
[...] das Umkopieren von der alten 500MB Festplatte auf die 1GB Platte mittels “Wiederherstellen” im [...]
Wednesday 2009-02-25 at 07:38 GMT +0000 |
did the suggested method and keep getting same error. says “disk restore failed. timed out” please help me.
Wednesday 2009-02-25 at 17:08 GMT +0000 |
I’m not 100% sure, but “Time Out” seems like a different problem. Maybe you should try to just format the 1TB drive and see how that goes. If that also reasults in a timeout, you may have a faulty drive.
You can also try to format the drive on a different machine, at a friends house.
If that doesn’t work, and you’re sure that the drive is working correctly, you can try reading the Apple support forums, or calling the Apple support desk.
Friday 2009-03-20 at 15:19 GMT +0000 |
you’re the man, rolfje. cheers
Monday 2009-04-20 at 07:22 GMT +0000 |
Thx for a great How-To
May be worth adding that the new volume is verified as part of the restore process.
Moving from a 500GB disk to a 1GB disk took 17 hours for me.
Thursday 2009-05-14 at 10:16 GMT +0000 |
First, thanks for a great howto!
Now for some problems: I tried this yesterday, moving from a 750GB MyBook to a 1TB MyBook, but got the “Timeout” error just as Tyler reported. The copy seems to have been complete, but the copy has B-tree errors and is not repairable.
My hunch is that this is due to the sleep mode of the MyBook disks, which has bothered me before. Does anyone know of an easy trick to force both the two disks to NOT fall asleep during the copy?
Monday 2009-05-18 at 10:21 GMT +0000 |
SOLVED!
I tried it once more with a different MacBook Pro, this time with both disks connected directly to the mac (one on FW800, one on FW400), but with no luck.
Then I got an idea: I reduced the volume size on the new disk to about the same as the old disk (a few bytes more), and tried with the first mac again (both disks on FW800) – and it worked! Immediately after the successful copy, I extended the partition again to fill the whole 1TB disk. I now use the larger disk for Time Machine, and it seems to work perfectly.
(Please note that the repartitioning took a long time! I think 45 minutes)
Wednesday 2009-06-10 at 11:12 GMT +0000 |
Hmmm, I came across an extended attribute that holds the ID of the backup disk. As in the above instructions this ID is not changed, I assume that Time Machine currently does not validate that value (or, maybe worse: that during the copying above the disk id is copied as well — if so, then fully erasing the original disk might prevent future issues?)
See com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID (”the UUID of the volume in question, matching the one you get with diskutil info /Volumes/Volume-Name”) at http://earthlingsoft.net/ssp/blog/2008/03/x5_time_machine
Sunday 2009-06-21 at 18:49 GMT +0000 |
Thanks very much for this great tip. I wanted to switch out a 1TB hard drive connected to my 24″ iMac Aluminum and followed the instructions and it worked exactly as you said…a perfect copy. I had about 500GB of data on my Time Machine. Both the new and original drives were connected via USB and it took about 12 hours for Disk Utility to copy and verify everything. I left it running overnight and the next morning I had an exact copy ready to go. Thanks again…great stuff!
Sunday 2009-06-28 at 16:48 GMT +0000 |
Just an FYI for those wanting to do this in the other direction (Larger -> Smaller disk) for whatever reason (re-utilization of disks etc), this works fine so long as the currently used disk space on the current larger drive is less than the total disk space on the smaller drive.
Tuesday 2009-07-07 at 15:40 GMT +0000 |
Moved 350 GB from USB drive to new 1 TB FW drive. Took ~4 h. Worked exactly as described. Easy!