PSA: Don’t convert your Time Machine drive from HFS+ to APFSĬan I transfer my Time Machine backups to a new drive?.How do you delete Time Machine backups from the Trash?.Fix Time Machine when it freezes on ‘Preparing Backup’.How to set up and use macOS and OS X Time Machine.Turn on Time Machine again, with your new drive as the destination.Open Finder and drag the ‘Backups’ folder from your old drive to your new one.Temporarily turn off Time Machine backups in System Preferences.Get Info for your new drive in Finder and turn off the option to ‘Ignore ownership on this volume.’.Ensure your new drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a GUID Partition Map scheme.Quick Tipsįollow these quick tips to get started quickly on transferring your Mac’s Time Machine backup to a new drive or read the full instructions further down in the post: Other users have waited days for their transfers to finish. It took me four hours to move 250 GB of backups to a new drive.

WARNING: Moving your Time Machine backups can be a very time-consuming process. If you want to keep those snapshots you need to transfer them to a new drive using the process we’ve described below. Time Machine saves snapshots of your Mac from the past days, weeks, months or even years. In this post, we’ve shown you how to do just that. But if your external Time Machine drive runs out of space or starts to fail, you might need to transfer those backups elsewhere. Time Machine is an excellent tool for backing up your Mac.

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