a generous designer’s blog

Some background story:

I’ve outgrown my 200 Gb backup disk very soon, so I had to find a solution. In my old PC I had a few bigger sized disk. One 200 Gb with two partitions, an installed XP with lot of installed games on the first, and films and softwares on the second partition. Another one with 300 Gb SATA and two partitions; an installed Vista on the first, and films and softwares on the second. And at last one 120 Gb, old backups of my works and music library on it. The first two disk was almost full, but I didn’t use the Vista, and the old backups could go to the trash.

It wasn’t easy to allocate the data to the other disks and free up the 300 Gb disk for the time machine. It took me two nights and a lot of thinking . So I plugged in both, this and the time machine backup disk into my MacBook.

The problem:

First I tried to simply copy the backups.backupsdb time machine folder to the new, bigger drive, but it didn’t work. It prepared for a while (2,5 million files :S ) and ended up with an error code -50. I also tried to copy the folders manually (one-by-one) but it also failed. (ok, just started to try… )

Than another problem came:

The right solution for transferring your Time Machine backup to another disk is to use the Disk Utility’s Restore function*. So I tried to restore the whole backup disk to my new disk, but after 10 minutes of preparing, Disk Utility failed to restore and ended up with a simple, meanless operation failed error. Other solutions are Carbon Copy Cloner** or SuperDuper!.

*How to restore: click the Restore tab on the right. First drag the disk or partition you want to restore from to the Source field (you don’t need to click the Image button if you restore from a whole disk), than drag the disk/partition you want to restore to, to the Destination field and click Restore. Additionally you can check the Erase destination option.

**Beware, because the earlier versions of CCC are copying the linked files wrong, I don’t know about the newer versions

The solution:

I found this Apple Support Discussion, but before I clicked a Verify Disk on my backup drive. It failed. After verifying failed, Repair Disk button was inactive, and I had to unmount and mount it back again to be able to press it again. It took about 2 hours or so, but the repair was succesful finally. You can also try the Repair permissions function, permissions can also cause these problems.

Be prepared for the next step: now you should be able to Restore. In my case, it took about 2 hours, and after the copy a verrification process goes through the disk… also very time consuming.

When the restore finishes there will be two disks with the same content and same name. So I suggest to turn off the Time Machine before this, or at least check that the next scheduled backup isn’t near. With the Disk Utility you can easily identify the old drive and unmount it. If the right disk is in, you can turn on the Time Machine, Change Disk and select your newly restored disk again to get a proper drive icon and then Back Up Now to try… Good luck.