Moving Your Mac Leopard Time Machine to a New Drive

February 18, 2008 – 8:57 pm
by Jake D

Categories: Apple/Mac, WordPress | Pages: 1 2 3


I recently upgraded to a 1 Terabyte external hard drive and wanted to move my Time Machine backups to that drive (and start using this new drive for Time Machine). This is how I did it.

Quick Solution: Use Disk Utility to Restore your old drive to your new drive, then tell Time Machine that you want to use a different disk

The Whole Story

When I got the 1TB drive, it was formatted as FAT32. I had been using Time Machine (I am running Mac OS 10.5.2) and I wanted to use my new drive for Time Machine, but I wanted to keep my current Time Machine history. My vision was to have the exact same data, but now my external drive can hold more. I ran into a few issues while trying to do this, so here is how I solved them.

Note: The sections “Formatting the new hard drive”, “Transfer the files”, and “Transfer Problems” narrate the problems I had while trying to just copy files… see the following section, “Use Disk Utility Instead”, for enumerated instructions on how I actually solved the problem.

Formatting the new hard drive

When I first plugged in the drive, Leopard recognized it. I thought that I might just be able to dump the files from my old external hard drive (formatted in HFS+) onto the new one (FAT32). When I selected the files to move and dragged them to the new folder, I heard the “pang” sound that Finder makes when you copy files, but nothing actually happened.

Since I will only use this new drive on a Mac, I thought maybe I should reformat to HFS+ (I also thought that Time Machine might require it). Using Disk Utility, I ran into a few vague errors and the disk would never be successfully formatted. I found the solution on the Apple Discussion Forums .

This basically says that you must select the highest parent of the drive you want to format
Select highest parent

and select the “Partition” page.

Partition Page

Then go to “Options…” and select the top option: “GUID”.

The formatting should only take a few seconds.

The next page goes over transferring your files.

Pages: 1 2 3


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  1. 25 Responses to “Moving Your Mac Leopard Time Machine to a New Drive”

  2. On Mar 14, 2008 ttrtilley said:

    Disk Utility doesn’t do Time Capsule (afp) volumes.
    So I tried /usr/bin/ditto and got:

    rt1 root# ditto /Volumes/Backup2/Backups.backupdb /Volumes/rt1
    ditto: /Volumes/rt1/rt’s MacBook Pro/2008-01-11-160545/iTunes/.com.apple.timemachine.supported: Operation not supported

  3. On Apr 6, 2008 Kevin said:

    Thanks for the walkthrough. I just did this for my wife’s iMac and just let the backups go because I could not figure out a way to get them to the new drive I bought. Fortunately, I keep a Mirra server with a total backup of her machine so it was no real loss when I replaced her timemachine drive.

    Anyway my old time machine drive on my MacBook Pro started giving me the “I’m out of space” from Time Machine yesterday so I ordered a WD My Book Studio 750 GB for my mac so your article is a lifesaver as I have no other backup except for My Pictures and My Music on DVD.

  4. On Apr 7, 2008 Duncan said:

    Worked a treat – took about an hour to move 50Gb to a 500Gb drive.

    Thanks.

  5. On Feb 27, 2009 Blair Allen said:

    I have tried the disk utillity technique four times. Same result:

    Note: I am trying to move a very full 250gb time machine back up onto a 1tb drive and seemlessly continue backing up through time machine.

    1. I get an error that says “Could not restore – operation timed out”
    2. The 1tb drive ends up a carbon copy of the previous drive. The problem is that my computer sees the 1tb drive as an almost full 250gb drive.

    Please help!

  6. On Feb 28, 2009 Jake D said:

    Blair,

    Did you check the Erase destination box? (Step 6)

    Can you tell how many partitions are on your 1TB drive when you complete? (If you mac sees only a 250GB, it might also see a ~750GB partition, too)

  7. On Mar 9, 2009 Vince Collins said:

    Thank you!

    Flawless. I transferred a Time Machine backup volume from a WD Passport 160 Gig drive to a 300 Gig partition on a WD 1 TB drive, no problems whatsoever.

    Thanks again for the tip!

  8. On Jun 18, 2009 Yaron Ofek said:

    Thanks for the excellent article. I want to offer the following experience I had for those who want to use the disk for Windows compatibality.

    In addition to using my external drive (WD passport essentials 500GB) as my time machine, I wanted to have a FAT partition so I could use it transfer files from my mac to a Windows XP machine. I couldn’t find the answers spelled out, so I experimented, and it worked.
    When I partitioned the drive I created a Mac OS extended format for the large (main) partition and a FAT32 format for a 32GB partition. This caused the Disk Utility to force me to select Master Boot Record (the 3rd option) instead of the GUID which I would have otherwise selected for my Intel based macbook. I was concerned that Time Machine would insist on GUID, preventing me from adding the FAT partition. As I am writing these words, Time Machine is performing its first backup on the new drive in the mac os extended partition, without complaint. The FAT partition rests quietly alongside, while the disk was formatted with the MBR option. I hope this saves time for others with the same need.

  9. On Aug 20, 2009 Dylan said:

    Thanks for the help!

    I’ve been trying to transfer my backup for about an hour now with no luck. I kept getting Error Code -1426, which I think is some kind of Permissions error, but your tutorial worked fine for me.

  10. On Sep 5, 2009 Walter said:

    Can’t initiate the copy. After permissions validation, gives me this error

    ‘Could not validate source – bad file descriptor.’

  11. On Sep 5, 2009 Walter said:

    P.S. I’m on 10.6

  12. On Sep 7, 2009 Jake D said:

    I haven’t run this on 10.6. Is anybody else having this problem?

  13. On Sep 10, 2009 WT said:

    I am having this same issue in 10.6 (never tried it in 10.5 so I do not know if it is a unique 10.6 issue or not). I tried to have Disk Utility repair the disk, to no avail.

  14. On Sep 10, 2009 Dean P said:

    I, too, am getting the error “Could not validate source – Bad file descriptor” when I try to create a backup in 10.6 through Disk Utility. I’ve also tried SuperDuper! and had the system simply shut down in the middle of the process with no warning or error message.

  15. On Sep 12, 2009 Jake D said:

    I don’t have the hardware right now to try this on 10.6 (I just upgraded).

    Try using the Snow Leopard Install Disk to run Disk Utility. This involves restarting your mac with the CD already inserted, then exiting the wizard but running Disk Utility from the CD.

    Also, I see there is a Software Update to 10.6.1, maybe that will help.

    Please let me know if that works!

  16. On Oct 27, 2009 Jan G said:

    Same issue here, when I try starting the restore all I get is “Could not validate source – Bad file descriptor”, on 10.6.1 – only idea I have left is to go GUI free and try dd on the terminal, but have no idea what that will give as the source and target drives have different sizes.

    Anyone who already tried that? Any hints would be greatly appreciated :)

    And great article, thanks!

  17. On Dec 1, 2009 Mark A said:

    Same issue here. “Could not validate source – Bad file descriptor” but Disk Utility reports no errors on this disk. Also ran Tech Tool Pro 5 and it reported no errors. Anyone found away to get around this?

  18. On Jan 2, 2010 Kayte said:

    The Disk Utility solution worked great for me. Thanks!

  19. On Jan 16, 2010 Sid said:

    Thanks!!!

    I successfully used Disk Utility to move 377 GB of Time Machine backups from a 500 GB Time Capsule (by Ethernet) to a new La Cie 1 TB external hard drive (by USB). Copying took about 5 hours. I am using a MacBook Pro with 10.6.2 installed. BTW I did not need to use the Snow Leopard Install Disk to run Disk Utility.

  20. On Jan 22, 2010 Erk said:

    to solve the bad file descriptor error….
    make sure you deselect the current time machine drive from the tm preferences (select “none”) before you try to restore.

  21. On Mar 4, 2010 Bung said:

    Sorry, Erk. That didn’t work. Still getting “Could not validate source – Bad file descriptor”

  22. On Mar 4, 2010 Bung said:

    Aha – but ejecting both drives and doing it on another machine with 10.5.8 seems to be working.

  23. On Mar 4, 2010 Eric said:

    Doesn’t work for me either. Funny different everyone’s experiences are. Snow Leopard was a big wake-up call for me. I’m seeing, among other things, that the manufacturer of a drive can make a difference with Apple OS/X. Wow. That’s incredible.

    Bad File Descriptor problem: Any other ideas? I’m fresh out.

  24. On Mar 25, 2010 Walterhisownself said:

    I get the same “Could not validate source – Bad file descriptor” using Snow Leopard 10.6.2. My new external drive is a 1TB LaCie and the old one is a 500GB acomdata.

    Don’t know what to do to fix this. I’m just going to burn the last back up to DVD and then start with the new 1TB drive. The old one will be erased.

  25. On May 10, 2010 Anonymous said:

    Tried 1.000 times on 10.6 (MacbookPro ). Always with the “bad file description” error.

    Found an “old” 10.5 (PPC). Just started the DiskUtility and it looks like it’s doing something. Calculating time …

    Will let you know!

  26. On May 23, 2010 ahlongxp said:

    Could not validate source – Bad file descriptor

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