How to move your Time Machine backups to a larger/newer/different drive

When I got my Mac one of the things I was most looking forward to was Time Machine. My backup strategy was pretty crappy prior to this (burning to DVD's etc), luckily I have never had a major Hard drive death (though my partner's crappy Dell laptop once died, but the stick the drive in the freezer method allowed us to get the data onto a new drive). So I figure I didn't want to tempt fate much longer, and I headed out and purchased a 1TB Seagate external. I partitioned this so I could use it for both Mac and PC backups.

Well I recently had a big re-org on my Windows HTPC, and decided it was time to dedicate a single drive to my Mac backups. I bought myself a Western Digital Elements 2.5" 500gb drive (my Mac drive is 320gb and not full), figuring this would keep me safe for some time, plus it's nice and portable so I can take it with me easily and still do backups, I could then turn the Seagate to it's full 1TB for my HTPC.

I had read lots of posts/articles about moving time machine backups, people having problems because they think they can just copy it directly to a new drive. This doesn't work because your Time Machine Backups are actually what is known as a*<a onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview ('/outgoing/http_en_wikipedia_org_wiki_Sparse_image');" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_image" target="_blank">"sparsebundle" or "sparse image". </a>Being from a PC background I had never heard of this but read the Wikipedia article if you wanna know more.

Anyway, it turns out that copying from one drive to another is absurdly simple, it just takes for*<em>frakking ever </em>if you have a huge backup. This task is best left overnight or something like that (possibly longer if you have a mega huge backup). For instance my backup size was 210gb. It took about 2 hours for the copy, and then another 2 hours for the "verify" (these were two USB disks). I wasn't sure if you could skip the verification, but I didn't want to risk it lest I have to start the entire process from scratch.

The best part of this is that you don't need any extra software to do this, you simply use Disk Utility.

To start off, plug in both your old drive, and your new drive. You'll probably want to do one last Time Machine Backup to the old drive first. Let it do it's thing, and then*<strong><em>turn Time Machine OFF. </em></strong>You don't want Time Machine to try and do a backup while you're copying the drive!

Your new drive is probably formatted as FAT32 or even worse NTFS. It's probably best to use the Partition Tab to reformat the drive with a single partition. Remember to click the "options" button and select GUID Partitioning. Give your disk a name as well (untitled, how boring!).

Okay, once this is done now go to the RESTORE tab.
<ol>
<li>Drag the old time machine disk/partition to the "source" box.</li>
<li>Drag the new disk/partition to the "destination" box.</li>
<li>Click the "erase destination" option <em>(important, it won't work if you don't do this)</em>.</li>
<li>Click the "restore" button.</li>
<li>Depending on the size of your backup, you might have to wait AGES. If your backup was 1TB for instance, and you were restoring up to some bigger drive, I dread to think how long it might take. You've been warned!</li>
</ol>
Once all is complete, unplug the <strong>OLD</strong> drive. Switch Time Machine back on, and it should automatically recognise the new drive and just do it's thing (again). For some reason mine did the "preparing" thing for ages, but eventually it did it's thing and all was well.

<strong>DON'T</strong> plug in both drives at once as this will probably just confuse Time Machine. It would probably be best to repartition the old drive with Time Machine turned OFF if you still plan to use it with your Mac so there can be no chance of Time Machine getting confused.

You can apparently also use Carbon Copy Cloner to do this job as well. I don't know if it might be any quicker, and I'm not going to do it again to find out! *I'm unsure if there's anyway to move a backup from a Time Capsule to another drive/vice versa, or maybe from one Time Capsule to another (500gb to 1TB?).

With the price of external drives just nutsily crazy these days, there's no reason not to use Time Machine at least for your backups. Imagine the devastation if your HDD died and no backup. I personally couldn't stand it. Of course you also have the added bonus that if you're left with a time machine backup you get the fun and excitement of purchasing a shiny new mac to load it onto if your old one goes belly up! Aren't we all secretly waiting for that day?