external hard drive time machine copy not working

I checked in other sites describing this method and it always failed no matter how hard I tried. I followed the instructions for the Disk Utility method and it failed again saying in the error message that it could not verify the sizes of the drives. In this page ( sk-utility) the author is very helpfull in describing and comparing different methods for this task. So this time I try a new method that I found googling. Apple could create a detection system that after preparing the copy (which already takes forever) could detect if the copy could be made. It took ages and every different try-out I had to wait and see if it worked, with each failure being very frustrating. Now this is my first big critic that implied having to try different solutions for this long: the size of the backup and the apparent complexity of the data transferred took very long even though both drives are USB 3.0 and directly connected to the iMac. I have another user with standard type but Apple’s article did not refer any issue with users. This was strange as I am a Admin in my system and have been creating the backups since the beginning. I started copying ok but it stopped after 36 hours claiming that I did not have permission to access some of the items. I first tried Apple's method as they explain in the KB article referred above.

I will now describe what I tried until I finally managed to solve the issue. In my case it didn't work and that's when my problems began 3 weeks ago. drag backup folder from old drive to new drive At the time I started the migration, the backup folder had 2.9 TB.Īpple has a help topic that describes their preferred solution ( Time Machine: How to transfer backups from a current backup drive to a new backup drive - Apple Support) which consists in: My old drive with 3TB was getting full and I decided to buy a new one with 8Tb and re-purpose Old drive to other tasks and use new drive also for backup of a new Macbook Air.

The simple task at hand was to move the time machine backups from an external drive (Old drive) to a new bigger drive (New drive). So I'm writing this for future use of the community if someone has the same issues I had and cannot find a straightforward solution.

External hard drive time machine copy not working