external hard drive time machine copy not working

You can’t even leave it to do this while you go away, because at some point – who knows when – you will be prompted for your password to continue the process. In my experience that rarely works.įirstly if you have a Time Machine backup that is measured in the terabytes (mine is currently 2.4TB), Finder will spend about a day “preparing the files to be copied”.

Yes I know I could simply start afresh on the new drive with a whole new Time Machine backup, but I have backups on the old drive that date back two years, and if I started afresh, then later realized I needed an old, now deleted file, I’d feel pretty stupid.Įssentially Apple’s instructions simply tell you to turn off Time Machine, then drag and drop your old Backups.backupdb folder from one drive to another. Most of the time I run into problems when I want to copy the Time Machine backup from an old drive to a new, larger drive. If you then happen to post a query on the Apple support forum, no matter how concisely you explain your issue, you just get bombarded with people who simply quote the Apple instructions back to you. The Apple support document makes things sound easy, but in my experience, you can run into a host of problems if you try and follow the instructions. Time Machine is a great backup feature that has saved my ass on more than a couple of occasions, but it has severe issues when it comes to copying the backup files to a new location.

So, if you’re here for photography chat, you can skip this post, but if you’re here to solve a Time Machine copy problem, I think I have the best solution. In fact, a previous tutorial on how to force your Mac to empty its Trash when there is an old Time Machine backup stuck in it, is one of the most viewed blog posts on this site, and has literally hundreds of comments on it thanking me for “the only solution that actually works”. Today isn’t the first time I’ll be writing about how to solve issues with Apple’s Time Machine backup system. From time to time on this blog, I’ll post quick tutorials about technical issues that have previously caused me problems.

External hard drive time machine copy not working