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ElRay2676 Author

Level 1

16 points

Can I Transfer old Time Machine Backups to a New Drive?

I have several OLD hard drives with Time Machine backups on them. I also have a new, much larger, RAID5 drive. What I'd like to do it to archive the old Time Machine Back-ups to the new drive, before the old drives finally die.

I do not have any expectation of merging the back-ups, I just want to copy the old "ComputerName" folders in the various Backups.backupdb folders into the new "master" Backups.backupdb. Also, I may need to rename one of the old "ComputerName" sub-folders.

If that is a no-go, can I just restore the latest version of every backed-up file/folder to a sub-folder on the new drive, so the files aren't lost?

Mac mini, macOS 11.0

Posted on Dec 9, 2020 9:57 AM

Top-ranking reply

Tesserax

Level 10

151,665 points

Posted on Dec 9, 2020 10:16 AM

This should be possible. See the following article on the details:

Time Machine: How to transfer backups from a current backup drive to a new backup drive - Apple Support

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Can I Transfer old Time Machine Backups to a New Drive?

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