Moving a Time Machine Drive
Something I’ve been working on doing for a little while is getting my 500gb (300 of it partitioned for this) Time Machine drive moved to a new 1tb drive for this purpose. Well, it took forever and a few tries but I have finally completed a backup on the new drive!
I was first told to use the Restore feature in Disk Utility by dragging the drives into the restore tab… but that didn’t work. It gave me “Operation not permitted” errors — which prompted me to turn off Time Machine itself which I had forgot! Unfortunately, that didn’t fix the problem so I was forced to look for alternative solutions.
The next thing I tried was SuperDuper. It’s a file copier that apparently supports doing moving Time Machine backups. At least, that’s what I read on their and other websites. A few hours after trying that I got the files copied, but the permissions were all off so it made the Time Machine drive unusable. Frustrating!
Finally… I did it the long way. I had enough free disk space to make a dmg of the entire drive. I made one by selecting the original TM partition and hitting “New Image” in Disk Utility. After finishing that, I indexed the image by going to “Scan Image for Restore”. About 2 hours later, I was ready to do the block level copy by using the Restore tab and checking the “Erase destination” box. Thankfully, it worked! I had one thing left to try but I’m really happy that I didn’t have to waste more time getting it running.
Now to get RAID0 striping working on my 2 500gb drives…


