Comments on: Moving a Time Machine Backup to a Time Capsule

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 05:52:30 +0000

Thank you! My move didn’t succeed the first time so I had to buy SuperDuper! so I could copy the rest of the files.

By: Charles

Charles — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 04:27:04 +0000

FYI,

Here’s Apple’s recommended way of achieving the same result:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427

Charles

By: Vicki Randle

Vicki Randle — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 22:12:59 +0000

You rule the world. I love that people are dedicated and geeky enough to actually print the method and steps to something that didn’t occur to me to wonder about until i actually got my time capsule running. hmmmm, it looks like i can’t just transfer from one drive to another. there’s got to be a way. to the googles!”
thanks ever so, from someone you don’t know and will never probably meet, for the gift of your knowledge and willingness to share with anyone.

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:54:57 +0000

Worked like a charm to move my data from a USB 320GB drive to a 500GB drive connnected to an airport extreme! Thanks!

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:55:27 +0000

Is this any different if you make the transfer from one Time Capsule to another (I upgraded from 500gb to 1TB)?

By: Simon

Simon — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 21:01:09 +0000

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.

By: Gian

Gian — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 01:34:49 +0000

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!

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 06:49:35 +0000

Worked like a charm, many thanks

By: Gian

Gian — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 09:19:06 +0000

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 ;)

By: jesper

jesper — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:31:19 +0000

works like a charm!

Thanks.

By: Qattan

Qattan — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:27:09 +0000

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?

By: Frederic

Frederic — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 03:20:45 +0000

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?

By: Steve S

Steve S — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:32:43 +0000

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!

By: Ben

Ben — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 22:20:37 +0000

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.

By: el_mio

el_mio — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 10:15:24 +0000

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.

By: sl

sl — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:09:40 +0000

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!

By: Fred Duck

Fred Duck — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:58:24 +0000

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.

By: hoyla

hoyla — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:51:59 +0000

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…?

By: Collin D Blackman

Collin D Blackman — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:11:14 +0000

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.

By: Copying a Time Machine Backup - Mac-Forums.com

Copying a Time Machine Backup - Mac-Forums.com — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:43:08 +0000

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