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Old 02-26-2009, 11:43 AM
rich rich is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2009
Posts: 6
Problem copying time machine backup

I'm trying to copy my time machine backup from an old external drive to a new one.

The old drive has some kind of low level file system corruption that fsck can't fix which means it can only be mounted read only. Apart from being read only everything else seems fine. All the data is there and readable. I've tried doing a block level copy using disk utility but that's not working because it also copies the corruption. File level copies work but break when they hit time machine's folder hard links. That's what lead me to SuperDuper which seems to do a file level copy but still support folder hard links.

Here's my problem. My new disk is formatted as Journaled HFS+. When I run "Backup all files, erase then copy" the first thing SuperDuper does is reformat the drive as HFS+ without the journaling. It then spends 3 hours happily copying files across before it hits the first folder hard link and dies with the message:

"Error | SDCopy: Attempt to create hard link on /Volumes/Vault but file system format does not support hard links. Please enable HFS+ Journaling with Disk Utility and try again."

I've tried this a couple of times now to confirm that SuperDuper really is disabling the journaling itself. The last time I even used Disk Utility to turn journaling back on shortly after SuperDuper started copying files. That seemed to work but SuperDuper still dies with the same error message even though journaling *is* enabled. I guess SuperDuper is caching the journaling status not expecting someone to change it mid-backup.

So what can I do to convince SuperDuper to proceed? Can I force it to turn journaling on when it reformats the drive? Can I get it to do the backup without reformatting the drive at all?
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