Jan 5, 2009
Moving a Time Machine Backup to a Time Capsule
I bought myself a Time Capsule, for a few reasons. Our wireless network at home has been pretty flaky—our AirPort Expresses (AirPorts Express?) seem to drop off the network a lot, and the “AirTunes” feature cuts in and out—and I have this vague hope that a network made up of all Apple hardware will work better. I also like the idea of always-available, wireless network-attached storage, since I’m only pretty good about remembering to hook up the external backup drive, and Rachel never remembers. Now that we’re both running Leopard, Time Machine + Time Capsule seems to add up to painless backups.
The hitch was that I’ve been running Leopard with Time Machine backups on my external LaCie drive for a few months now, and I wanted to move those backups to our shiny new 1 TB drive and maintain that backup history. When I called Apple support (our first Time Capsule was a dud) to ask how one might migrate an existing Time Machine backup from an external hard drive to a new Time Capsule, the nice man put me on hold for fifteen minutes and then came back to say it couldn’t be done.
Puh-leeze.
I know moving Time Machine backups isn’t as simple as just dragging the files from one drive to another. Because of the way the files are stored (Time Machine seems to use hard links to avoid wasting space) a regular file copy would massively inflate the size of your archive, and possibly screw up metadata, too. But surely Apple must have recognized that disks fail, archives grow, and people buy new hardware! There must be a way to move a Time Machine backup.
And there is! I found the solution on the discussion forums for SuperDuper, so that’s the software I used to accomplish the move. It’s possible that Apple’s DiskUtility would do the trick as well, but I didn’t try that. After going through it myself, I thought I’d gather the instructions in one place.
Here’s how to move a Time Machine backup from an external drive to a new Time Capsule:
- Hook up the external drive where you store your Time Machine backups, and do one more backup, just to be safe, by choosing “Back Up Now” from the Time Machine menu on the menu bar.
- Make sure your computer has a name in System Preferences -> Sharing or else your first Time Capsule backup will fail. This would be annoying later on.
- Set up your Time Capsule using the AirPort Utility. When you’re done, you should be able to see the Time Capsule under Shared in the sidebar of a Finder window:
- Mount the Time Capsule drive, by selecting the Time Capsule in the sidebar, and then, if necessary, clicking the Connect As… button and entering your Time Capsule password (that you set up in the AirPort Utility).
You should then see a folder called Data. This represents the internal disk in your Time Capsule.
Double-click on the folder to open it; it should be empty. - Open the Time Machine preference pane (by choosing Open Time Machine Preferences… from the Time Machine menu) and click Change Disk… Choose your new Time Capsule from the list.
- From the Time Machine menu, choose Back Up Now to force Time Machine to start backing up to your Time Capsule. Once it starts whirring along, check out the Finder window that was showing the contents of your Data folder. Very soon you should see a file appear in that window whose name ends with
.sparsebundle. Once you see that file, cancel the Time Machine backup—we were only using it to create the sparse bundle file. Once it stops, turn Time Machine off. - Download SuperDuper, which is a pretty nifty backup and disk copying program. The free version is all you’ll need, but if you like it, you might consider buying the full version to support the fine people who made it possible.
- Double-click the sparse bundle file that you saw created earlier. This should cause a new drive to mount on your desktop, called Backup of your computer name.
- Launch SuperDuper. Set it to Copy your old backup drive to Backup of [your computer name] using Backup – all files. Click the Options… button, and choose Erase backup, then copy.
Double check that your old backup drive is the source (on the left) and your Time Capsule is the destination (on the right). I mean, seriously. Then, take a deep breath, and push Copy Now.
- Go kill some time! This will take a while. My 200 GB of backups took about eight hours, copying from a FireWire 800 drive to a Time Capsule over wired Ethernet.
- When it finally finishes, go back into your Time Machine preferences and make sure your Time Capsule is still selected as the backup drive. Now, Enter Time Machine and verify that your backup history is still present. Voila!
- At this point, I recommend doing one more Back Up Now just to make sure everything’s working properly. This first backup after the copy will take a long while during the Preparing… phase. I’m not sure why. After that, you should be in business.
Hope this helps someone else!
Mmmmmmmm. 1 TB Drive….
Thanks, I’m planning on migrating to a Time Capsule, too. The one thing I’m still not sure about from your post is if I can migrate two Time Machine backup disks to one Time Capsule.
I have both my iMacs using TM to external drives and I know that TC supports backups for multiple machines. So I assume I can repeat this process and I’ll just have two sparsebundle files – one for each computer.
da, that sounds about right to me! Good luck.
I also want to move my sparse bundle from the external drive to the replacement time capsule. Apple’s advice did not work.
It seems very complicated to take only the sparse bundle off of my external drive when I have another 20 things there. How do you do that?
ipress, I’m not entirely sure I understand what you’re asking, but I think you can follow my instructions and then just delete whatever you don’t want on your Time Capsule once you’re done. Does that make sense?
Well I did this and almost got it to work. I used Disk Utility rather than SuperDuper to clone my old drive, and my new drive is not a time capsule but rather a drive I am accessing over my network, so it uses the same sparsebundle disk image, so I’d think the steps would be the same, however…
While everything seemed to go ok and the file structure form the old backups remains intact, and time machine preferences list my oldest backup correctly, when I go into time machine I am not able to navigate back (I can access newly created backups since the drive swap). Hmmm….
Thank you for the help! I am transferring files as I type now, with fingers crossed.
Okay… so I was scared to death for about 10 minutes. Mainly because:
-It took about 33 hours to SuperDuper the drive
-I had changed the backup volume a few times and then accidentally hit backup now when I meant to go to the Time Machine backups first.
-And it read, Error Reading Data, try another drive… or something to that effect.
But…
-Double-checked the sparsebundle’s contents via remounting the one ON THE TC
-I reconnected the TC – changed a setting through Airport Settings, and hit “Enter Time Machine”
Voila! Worked. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! This was a great tutorial.
Thank you, excellent summary of the Shirt Pocket forum. After reading your tutorial I knew exactly what to do, which was not the case after reading through the original forum. As we speak, my original TM backup is now duplicating to the new TC. Doing it over wireless BTW. Looks like the copy is progressing at somewhere between 1.5 and 2 Mbps. As I only have 95 GB or so to copy (just started using Leopard and TM), it should be done in 30 hours, at the minimum. Fingers crossed and boy will they be sore by the time the transfer is done!
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Matt – you comment on a flaky wireless – try putting the IP numbers for your ISP into Sys Prefs/Network/DNS and see if that helps.
Hi – thanks for this, Matt.
Apols if a dumb question, everyone…
Matt says in point 10 “My 200 GB of backups took about eight hours … over wired Ethernet.” Does that mean you were connected to the TC by Ethernet throughout steps 3-8? Or did you connect wirelessly to set up the TC, then unmount and then mount it over Ethernet later?
I have nearly 250Gb of backup data on the old drive and want to use the fastest possible connection to the TC for the migration … Haven’t bought mine yet so can’t experiment. Perhaps mounting the TC by USB is an option…?
With regards to the extra-long “Preparing…” phase, when I migrated my backup, I took a look at console.app and it starts off with:
/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[36984] Waiting for index to be ready (905 > 0)
then moves to:
/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[36984] Waiting for Spotlight to finish indexing /Volumes/Backup of Computery/Backups.backupdb
The upshot being that even though SuperDuper! restores the Spotlight index, Time Machine doesn’t believe it and will happily spend hours and hours (and hours) redoing it.
Thanks for the wonderful tips! I tried these steps with my newly purchased Time Capsule 2TB, and everything went fine except at the very last part.
The transfer itself went fine without a hitch, and it was done with an ethernet cable connecting my mac and the TC. However, when I removed the ethernet cable and try to enter Time Machine or try the back-up, it is not able to recognize the backup volume.
Finder does seem to find the drive and the volume with no trouble. I can even navigate into all the backup directory for the past history. However, when I do “Enter Time Machine” or a back-up, Time Machines takes a LONG LONG time to connect to the volume, and eventually fails.
At one point, it did mount it but it did not recognize any backup history. Any idea how to troubleshoot the problem? Thanks!
Thanks Matt, this procedure indeed worked fine for me!
However, if you had two Macs backing up to the same external drive (like I did) the backups of both machines will end up in the sparse bundle files of each of the machines. That initially doubles the actual space required on the TC.
My solution was to temporarily move the entire backup folder (within the Backups.backupdb folder on the external drive) of the ‘other’ Mac to another drive. The external drive then only contained the backup data from one Mac that I could easily copy to its newly created sparse bundle file on the TC according following your procedure. By then moving back the data from the ‘other’ Mac to the external drive and deleting the data from the first, I could repeat the process.
Thanks so much for this. After searching the Internet far and wide, and finding post after post saying it wasn’t possible, couldn’t be done, just shoot yourself — I stumbled upon this, and it saved my life.
Thank you SO MUCH for posting this. I tackled this project this weekend and transferred 500 GB of data. I did have a few hiccups, though, so in the interest of paying it forward, here are some things I’ve found:
1) First of all, I upgraded to Snow Leopard last week, so some things may be slighting different for that reason.
2) After setting up the Time Capsule with the Airport Utility, you definitely want to turn off your computer’s wireless and then hard-connect to the Time Capsule via ethernet. I have zero experience connecting a drive via ethernet but it seemed to work flawlessly.
3) Double-clicking on the sparse bundle file did not mount new drive called Backup of [your computer name]. Instead, it mounted a drive called “Time Machine Backups”. However, copying my old sparse bundle to this one worked fine.
4) From a Firewire 800 drive my data rate went from 10 MB/s down to 8 MB/s. Total elapsed time was 14.5 hrs.
5) First time I tried this, I came back the next morning and found a black screen, an unresponsive laptop and an idle Firewire drive. I had to restart and try all over again. My best guess is that the screen saver or energy saver kicked in and crashed everything. So I disabled these the 2nd time around and was rewarded.
6) With my old back-up loaded onto the Time Capsule, I disconnected the ethernet cable and rebooted. My first time trying to access Time Machine took a LONG time, something like 15 minutes. It finally did access, though, and now appears to be working.
Matt, whoever you are, you rock!
I did what you said, and at the end of the process (which took 48 hours for 500G), there was an error message “could not mount the disk” or something to that effect. I tried to finish the process – TC is my backup disk, and I see the sparsebundle that is about 500G in size. I tried to do a Enter TIme Machine, but it said it could not. Am I missing a step? What do I do with a sparsebundle on the TC itself, and a disk image of Backup on my desktop?
Thank you very much Matt for the great tutorial. Like Steve S, I got a mounted drive called ‘Time Machine Backups’. Now, every time I backup, the drive is mounted (and appears on my desktop). Does anyone know if this is supposed to happen and/or if there is a way around it?
works like a charm!
Thanks.
Thanks a lot, Matt! Incredibly useful guide.
I’m having the same “problem” as Qattan, though, but i think i’m gonna live with the tm drive mounted on my desktop ;)
Worked like a charm, many thanks
Just to say that after the first manual backup, everytime it backs up on its own, the drive is mounted and unmounted automatically, so no problem at all!
Everything worked and is working fine!
Thanks again!
I have what is perhaps a silly question, but hopefully someone can answer it for me.
When it comes to making the transfer by ethernet cable (Step 10), do I also need to be connected to the internet? And if so, does my computer automatically know to transfer the files via the ethernet cable rather than the much slower wireless internet connection?
I hope that makes sense, thanks in advance for any help, your webpage is a great resource.
Is this any different if you make the transfer from one Time Capsule to another (I upgraded from 500gb to 1TB)?
Worked like a charm to move my data from a USB 320GB drive to a 500GB drive connnected to an airport extreme! Thanks!