How to transfer Time Machine from one ext. drive to another in Ventura

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How to transfer Time Machine from one ext. drive to another in Ventura

While there are a lot of guides on how to transfer Time Machine backup from one external drive to another external drive, none of them appear to work with Ventura.

I have backups on a 1TB external ssd and I want to transfer them to a newer 2TB ssd. The 1TB back up is formatted as a standard APFS (Case-sensitive) volume. The 2TB is formatted as APFS. The guides state to switch off Time Machine to prevent it from backing up.

In Ventura there is no option to switch off Time Machine. You can only change it to be "manual". The catch is that this only happens after you add a disk. Adding the new 2TB drive to Time Machine initializes the disk and immediately starts to back up (whether I want it to or not). There appears to be no way to prevent this.

I was able to "kill" the back up my pressing stop backup once it started, but it is notable that by default there is not method to switch TimeMachine off by default.

In finder it does not allow me to drag and drop the folders from the old back up to the new. It does not allow copy at all.

I tried DiskUtility to restore to the new drive the old and that threw and error.

I have not found a guide that works.

Is there a way to do this?

Posted on Dec 20, 2022 05:33 PM

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Answer 1

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Happy Dad Author

Level 1

101 points

Dec 22, 2022 09:11 AM in response to Happy Dad

Following up on this I remembered I had Apple Care so I called support... After spending around an hour with first and second tier reps, we determined that this is an "undocumented feature" in Ventura. AKA, Ventura broke the ability to move old backups to a new drive.

What appears to have happened is that the rep confirmed that new "safe guards" have been put in TimeMachine to prevent users from copying data direct from the back ups without going through the TimeMachine restore process as that often caused "problems". The unintended side effect of this, is that it prevents you from performing ANY copy procedure from a TimeMachine archive. You can't move the backup archive to a new archive and there is no mechanism for this. 🤦🏻

My support has now been pushed to the TimeMachine engineering group to follow up with me on Tuesday, after the holidays.

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Answer 2

Barney-15E

Level 10

121,238 points

Dec 28, 2022 04:25 PM in response to cbaughm2

Apple Software Restore (ASR) is now capable of cloning the System Volume, so it may also be able to clone a Time Machine volume. ASR is the Restore tab in Disk Utility. I think I've seen where it didn't work, but I'm not sure.

The best way to have a copy of the Time Machine backup is to make another one.

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Answer 3

Barney-15E

Level 10

121,238 points

Dec 22, 2022 09:25 AM in response to Happy Dad

Since all of the backups are snapshots (assuming new APFS scheme), copying may require the use of tools designed to copy snapshots. That capability is probably not native to the Finder.

There doesn’t appear to be any verbs in tmutil nor diskutil to copy snapshots.

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Answer 4

cbaughm2

Level 1

8 points

Dec 28, 2022 01:30 PM in response to Happy Dad

Please post what you hear back. This is not a safeguard I have any interest in! I have made a clean OS install with Ventura and prior to doing this, made a time machine backup. Now I want to just save that backup to a new time machine drive and I can't find any way to do so. I would like to use the drive that it's currently on for other purposes.

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How to transfer Time Machine from one ext. drive to another in Ventura

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