Thank you for your responses. I must apologize for not doing a good job of explaining my problem correctly.
I have an external drive (1Tb) that is used for Time Machine backup. Currently Disk Utility shows me that 770.97 Gb is used. This drive has begun acting up so I wish to back it up to another external HD (1Tb), in effect make a copy of the Time Machine backup. Both drives are formatted MacOsExt(Journaled). Time Machine automated backups is disabled on my 16”MacBookPro (running Mojave 10.14.6) while I undergo copy of Time Machine from old drive to new drive. However the moment I begin to copy the drive, the progress bars displays:
1) “Preparing to copy to new drive”
... the numbers here keep increasing has it does an accrual of all the files which are to be copied... last time I attempted this there were over two and a half million items(!), took over twelve hours and could not terminate... why?
2) “Copying 184,034 items to new drive”… and directly under the progress bar I am informed “1.07 TB of 1.07TB - About 5 seconds”
... how can this be?
Disk Utility informs me that the old 1TB drive is using 770+ Gb of space and that the new 1Tb drive has 999.86 Gb of free space (virtually empty). But the moment I begin the copying process (drag the Backups.backupdb file to the new drive), the size of the file (per what is expressed in the progress bars) mushrooms to 1.07 Tb. Am I missing something? Thanks in advance for your time and assistance.
