Can I use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my Time Machine backup?
For important, albeit technical reasons, Carbon Copy Cloner will avoid copying the Time Machine 'Backups.backupdb' folder in a file-level copy. It is often possible, however, to clone a Time Machine volume with CCC using a block-level copy:
People also searched for can a backup Mac drive be installed on a different Mac, can i take a mac time machine backup and use it on a different macbook pro, back up mac on another mac, nu vot, will a backup of one mac restore a different one, backup macbook air and restore on another macbook air, backup a macbook using another macbook, copy. Copy this folder to the new drive, preferably using the 'Copy Exactly' feature in the OS X Finder (click for larger view). Screenshot by Topher Kessler/CNET To do this, first turn off Time Machine. Copying is a breeze: just drag the Backups.backupdb folder from the old drive to the new one. Depending on your system, the copying may take a while. This leaves the original backup in place, too.
Once Time Machine’s first backup to the first drive is complete, disconnect it from your Mac completely. Attach the second drive and repeat the steps above. Switching between Time Machine disks requires virtually no effort on your part, but you don’t want to connect both Time Machine disks simultaneously.
- Enable the 'Block copy' button in CCC's preferences: choose 'Preferences..' from the Carbon Copy Cloner menu and check the box to 'Indicate when a block-level clone is possible'
- Choose your source and destination volumes in CCC's main window
- Click the 'Block copy' button to require a block-level copy
- Click the Clone button
Time Machine is a highly proprietary Apple device, and the block-copy tool that CCC uses to clone it is also Apple proprietary. Given the limited access that CCC has to the implementation details of both Time Machine and the block-copy tool, support for cloning Time Machine volumes is 'Best Effort', and we cannot offer additional support for moving a Time Machine backup to a different volume when CCC's block copy method is unable to complete the task. If CCC refuses to permit a block copy or reports an error while attempting to clone a Time Machine volume, we recommend that you attempt to use Disk Utility's Restore functionality to clone the Time Machine volume instead.
Backing up Time Machine sparsebundle disk images (file-level backups)
When Time Machine is configured to back up a Macintosh to a network volume, Time Machine stores the backup in a sparsebundle disk image. CCC has no problem copying these sparsebundle disk image files. In fact, CCC quite capably copies only the bands within the sparsebundle that have changed, so you can add CCC to this type of setup for a second tier backup to an offsite network share.
CCC excludes the Backups.backupdb folder at the root level of a volume by default. However, you can choose 'Choose a folder..' from CCC's Source menu and choose that folder directly to configure CCC to back up the sparsebundle disk images. Note that the only items in a Backups.backupdb folder that CCC will copy are sparsebundle disk images. Other folders, e.g. local Time Machine backups will be excluded. Further, CCC will only consider sparsebundle images for deletion in a Backups.backupdb folder on the destination. Other items in this folder on the destination will be protected from deletion.
In summary, when it comes to backing up a Time Machine backup, CCC will only back up sparsebundle disk images during a file-level copy in which you explicitly choose the Backups.backupdb folder as the source, whereas the entire Time Machine Backup will be copied during a block-level copy. Bettertouchtool 2 318 – customize multi touch trackpad gestures copy.
Copy Time Machine Backup To New Drivers
The technical reasons for excluding a Time Machine backup from a file-level copy
Time machine uses a feature of the HFS+ filesystem that was introduced in Leopard called 'directory hard links'. Like file hard links, a directory that is hard linked to another directory is not actually a new directory, it is simply a pointer to the previous directory. Time Machine uses these hard links to make references to entire directory trees whose contained files have not been modified. To properly clone a Time Machine backup, these directory hard links must be preserved.
Directory hard links are proprietary to Apple. Apple discourages their casual use by third party developers because, used incorrectly, they could create devastating looping directory structures that would render a volume useless. For this reason and others, support for directory hard links has not been implemented in CCC's file-level synchronization engine. CCC's block-level cloning engine, on the other hand, does preserve directory hard links, and is therefore capable of cloning a Time Machine volume.
Force Time Machine Backup
Cloning a Time Machine volume that has failed sectors or filesystem corruption
Copy Time Machine Backup To New Drive Bootable
If your Time Machine volume has become corrupted and Time Machine refuses to use it due to this corruption, you may turn to CCC thinking that cloning it to a new, 'clean' volume will solve the problem. Unfortunately, CCC will not help you solve these kinds of problems. When you clone a volume with a block-level copy, filesystem corruption is preserved. In these cases, we concur with Apple's advice to start a new Time Machine backup from scratch.
Michael Brady wrote:
. . .
I want to use the new HD as the TM volume and continue with the same sequence of backups.
You can't. ?
Time Machine backups use a complex structure; everything is intricately linked together. If that structure is damaged, as yours is, they can't be copied successfully.
If you have a copy of +Disk Warrior+ or another heavy-duty 3rd-party disk repair app, it's possible it can repair the backups. DW is about $100, and probably a good investment for the future, but there's no guarantee it can fix the backups.
And it's not a good idea to mix other data with your backups. See #3 in [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
Copy Time Machine Backup To New Drive
Oct 30, 2010 5:29 PM