Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the '10.5: Remove obsolete disks from Time Machine' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
10.5: Remove obsolete disks from Time Machine
Authored by: asmeurer on Oct 26, '09 08:48:49AM
Any idea how to move these backups to a different drive. I have some old backups that I would like to archive because I am running out of space on my backup drive. The Finder won't let me move them as the hint noted. Will the cp command work correctly? I would be nice if I could access the moved backups with Time Machine, but it isn't absolutely necessary.

[ Reply to This | # ]
10.5: Remove obsolete disks from Time Machine
Authored by: Roger Workman on Oct 26, '09 10:30:53PM

This may not be exactly what you're looking for, but I wanted to move a couple of Time Machine archives from separate hard drives to a single Time Capsule. What I wound up doing was using Carbon Copy Cloner to make disk images of the old disks, and then copied those to the Time Capsule. The disk images are then mountable, and then (at least in theory) I should be able to restore files from the old backups.



[ Reply to This | # ]
10.5: Remove obsolete disks from Time Machine
Authored by: scooby509 on Oct 27, '09 04:43:16AM

cp should work fine, as should simply copying from the Finder.



[ Reply to This | # ]
10.5: Remove obsolete disks from Time Machine
Authored by: asmeurer on Oct 28, '09 06:16:49PM

Copying from the Finder does NOT work. If I try to drag the folder (this is a backup from an older computer that I am trying to move), I get "The volume is the wrong format for a backup." I will try cp, but I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't work because the way that backups are hardlinked.

As for the other commenter who noted that the backups will go away eventually, the whole reason that I want to move it to a different drive is to gain space to avoid Time Machine deleting old backups.



[ Reply to This | # ]
10.5: Remove obsolete disks from Time Machine
Authored by: scooby509 on Oct 27, '09 04:46:31AM

To clarify my last comment: you'd want to copy the files to the new volume and then, if necessary, delete them from the Time Machine backup. Or just copy them to the new volume and leave the old backups alone; they'll go away eventually.



[ Reply to This | # ]