Transfer Time Machine Backups to Another Hard Drive

Many Mac users may use the built-in Time Machine to backup all their data to an external drive. Once enabled, Time Machine will create incremental backups of files which users can use to restore the whole system or specific files from the backup drive. But what if you need to update your current 1TB external drive to a new 4TB drive? As your drive storage is limited, the oldest backups will be deleted when the drive is full. So how to safely transfer your existing Time Machine backups to a new drive? If you want to move existing backups to another drive, check out this tutorial. It is not so complicated to switch to a different Time Machine backup drive, but you still need to perform a series of actions in correct sequence, so as to ensure the safety and success of transferring backup files between different Time Machine drives.

Step 1:

Before the transfer, check the format of your new backup drive. To do so, connect the drive to your Mac, and open the Disk Utility (located in Applications/Utilities folder). As the Disk Utility opens, select the drive’s icon in the left bar, and check if it has a GUID partition and is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). If not, back up the data you wanna retain in this drive, and then reformat the drive after setting the options to Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and Scheme: GUID Partition Map.

Step 2:

Meanwhile, you also need to check the permission of the new drive. To do so, click its icon in the Finder sidebar, and choose Get Info from the File menu at the top. As the Get Info window opens, make sure the “Ignore ownership on this volume” at the bottom of the “Sharing & Permissions” section is deselected (unchecked).

Step 3:

After doing these two steps, your new drive can be used as a backup drive. Now turn off Time Machine by sliding the switch to Off in the Time Machine system preference pane, so that new backup will not be created while you are copying existing backups.

Step 4:

The copy of Time Machine backups is pretty straightforward, actually. First, open the original and new backup drives in two separate Finder windows. Second, drag the folder named “Backups.backupdb” from the original backup drive to the top level of the new backup drive. You will be required to enter an administrator name and password. So type them in the boxes, and click OK to start copying the backup files.

Step 5:

The whole process may take some time so you need to be a little patient if the size of your backup is quite large. After the copy is finished, turn on Time Machine again. In the Time Machine preferences window, click the Select Disk button and choose the new drive. Then click Use Disk to start using this drive as your new backup drive.

Now a new Time Machine backup will start itself and be stored on your news drive.