Moving Time Machine to a New Drive
Follow these steps to move your current Time Machine backup to a new, larger drive.
Transferring Your Time Machine Backup to a New Hard Drive
Once you’ve set up the new drive, you’ll need to transfer your old Time Machine backups to it. Here’s what to do.
Why Would You Need a New Time Machine Backup Drive?
Eventually, you may decide you need more room for your Time Machine backups and want to move them to a larger drive. You may need more room for two reasons. The amount of data you store on your Mac has no doubt grown over time as you added more applications and created and saved more documents. At some point, you may outgrow the amount of space available on your original Time Machine hard drive. The other reason for needing more room is a desire to store more data history. The more data history you store, the farther back in time you can retrieve a file. Time Machine saves multiple generations of documents or other data as long as you have enough room to accommodate them. However, when the drive fills up, Time Machine purges older backups to provide room for the most current data.
Selecting a New Time Machine Drive
With a Time Machine, drive size is more important than overall performance. Drive speed shouldn’t matter for a backup drive that you’re mostly using to store data without retrieving it, so you should look for the most storage you can afford. External enclosures are an excellent choice for Time Machine drives, allowing you to connect the drive to your Mac using Thunderbolt or USB 3 depending on your needs. USB 3 and later enclosures are by far the most popular and the least expensive of the enclosure options, and they are a good value for this use. Just make sure the enclosure is from a reputable manufacturer.
