Migrate Time Machine to Time Capsule

[drdocument]

ALL DONE AND PROBLEM-FREE

For the benefit of any who want to migrate Time Machine backups to a new drive (especially Time Capsule) so as to retain Time Machine backups as far back as possible, here's a final report on the experience.

It took quite a while, but the result is just what was desired: all existing Time Machine backups moved to a new drive (Time Capsule), and the new TM destination includes all the files back to the beginning of the TM history as it existed on the "old" TM destination drive.

It took quite a while for SuperDuper! to copy the files to the new destination as described in this thread, but the copy was successful with all links intact. One time-consuming part for me was, I'm sure, that I was copying to an Ethernet device. Even with Gigabit Ethernet, theoretically faster than FireWire 800, network traffic no doubt slowed copying.

And it may well be that the copying took longer because all the special links had to be maintained.

The other time-consuming step is that after the new TM destination is selected in TM prefs and TM turned back on, the new destination must be reindexed by Spotlight before regular TM backups can continue. Again, the new destination being an Ethernet device no doubt slowed progress, but a complete Spotlight reindex of 165GB takes a while regardless of the interface.

And of course I retained the files on the previous TM destination drive until the new destination was set up and working as expected.

Bottom line: You can copy existing Time Machine backup files to a new drive with SuperDuper! and keep TM history intact. It took two days to move files from a FireWire 800 external drive to an Ethernet-connected Time Capsule (Power Mac G5 dual 1.8 GHz with 3GB RAM), but it worked.

Thanks again, Dave, for the expert assistance!