I’m planning to purchase a one terabyte Western Digital My Book Essential external hard drive. I want to migrate my Time Machine backups for both my iMac and MacBook Pro to a larger capacity drive. The problem I have is both Time Machine backups are in two separate drives. I didn’t know whether moving a Time Machine backup is as easy as clicking and dragging from one drive to another or will it involve a great deal of blood, toil, tears, and sweat.
It looks like the folks at Macword sensed my distress because coincidentally enough they published a guide on how to transfer Time Machine backups which they got from roflje.com.
The process isn’t as bad as I thought it would be but it does require some degree of familiarization with the Mac OS and usage of Disk Utility.
The steps are:
1. After attaching, formatting (Mac Journaled), and naming the new drive, launch Time Machine and switch it off.
2. Unmount the current Time Machine drive by dragging it to the Trash. Remount it by either turning it off and then on again, or mounting it with Disk Utility. You do this so it loses its Time Machine icon and appears with the typical orange external drive icon.
3. Launch Disk Utility, select the old drive, and click on the Restore tab.
4. Drag the Time Machine partition from the old drive to the Source field in the Restore tab. Drag the new drive’s partition (assuming there’s just the one partition) to the Destination field.
5. Enable the Erase Destination option and click the Restore button.
6. Wait while Disk Utility does its job (this can take several hours).
7. When the job is done you’ll see two identical volumes on the Desktop. Unmount and disconnect the one that shows a capacity of 500GB (the old drive).
8. With the new drive mounted, open Time Machine and switch it on. Click on Select Disk and direct Time Machine to the new drive that contains your copied Time Machines backup.
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