Moving your TimeMachine

It's bound to happen to everyone, they outgrow their TimeMachine and want a new one, a bigger one, one that will allow them to go further into the past... I'm talking about OSX's built-in backup system here, I don't know what you were thinking..

So ever since starting to use OSX Leopard I've been using TimeMachine to keep a running backup of my laptop for two reasons - I can instantly jump back to an old revision of a file, and it keeps a near-constant mirror of the OS as it is with all of the software & settings intact. My laptop came with a 120gb drive and I've been using a 160gb USB drive for TimeMachine. Obviously enough, when this is my main machine I move a lot of files around - download lots of files (all legit), delete some, move others to a file server, but with TimeMachine keeping a regular hourly backup of all change files it can end up bloating up pretty quickly. Sure enough, within a few short months I'd filled up the drive and for the past three or four months it regularly informs me that it has flushed some older backups in preference to keeping newer data.

It's 2009 and hard drives of all sorts are insanely cheap. Taking advantage of the early sales I snagged a 320gb replacement internal drive for the laptop and a 500gb external drive for TimeMachine. Incidentally, both of the drives were made by Seagate, as all of my drives are, as all of their drives (at least up through their January 2009 new models) come with a five year warranty, so between backups I'm (mostly) guaranteed five years of usable storage.

Moving on.

I personally don't like moving data off a primary drive due to the inherent reliability problems of external storage - if it's important data then it needs to be on an actively used internal drive, not on a DVD or CD sitting on a shelf somewhere for grubby little fingers to play with (or get knocked over), and definitely not on a USB memory key that's going to get put through it's paces in the next laundry cycle. All external storage formats should be used for backups exclusively. End of story.

So, in order to keep my data intact I planned a drive shuffle. First I was going to migrate the TimeMachine backup data to the new external drive, then I was going to swap out the internal drives and follow up with a quick restore off the backup drive to the main OS drive. Simple enough, and something I've done before.

Well the first step, as mentioned, was to migrate the 160gb (actually only 145gb due to drive companies lying about the size of a "gigabyte") to the new 500gb drive so I could retain the last few months of data as an active backup. That seemed simple enough. Because the drive comes pre-formatted for use with Windows (NTFS), I plugged the new drive to my laptop, ran the funky Seagate software installer & allowed it to wipe & repartition my drive for OSX. After rebooting (yeah, go figure, silly company) I has a 465gb usable drive. But it didn't have my TimeMachine data.

The official guideline on migrating TimeMachine data is to use DiskUtility to "restore" the data to a new drive - odd terminology, but it kinda makes sense. Well, for some odd reason it started giving me an error when I tried this. Just to be sure (and because computers make us crazy by expecting different outcomes for repeating the same procedures) I tried again, and sure enough, the same error.

Poop.

A quick google later and I find two shareware utilities that might also do the trick - CarbonCopyCloner and the amusingly titled SuperDuper. Long story short - both tools would run for a few minutes and then seem to get stuck, sitting with zero change in progress while saying they're copying this file that's actually rather tiny (so it wasn't that it was just moving a huge file). Enough of that, back to google.

A bit more research turned up an article on the excellent MacOSXHints.com which detailed how to use the UNIX tool dd to copy a drive, including to use it to recover lost data off a partition. So I gave it a spin.

The instructions are simple. First off, use the tool "df" to find out the exact location of the partitions or drives you wish to copy (the first column marked "Filesystem"), e.g. the 160gb drive showed as "/dev/disk3" and its partition as "/dev/disk3s2", while the 500gb drive was "/dev/disk2". Then, once you know the drives you just run the following command: "dd olddrive newdrive" e.g. "dd /dev/disk3 /dev/disk2".

Well, while I was overjoyed that my first h@rDk0r3 use of UNIX in some time actually started to do something, I was dismayed to see it say the average copy speed was "1705KB" i.e. 1.7meg per second, and at that rate would take 26 hours to complete. Bummer. As it turns out, by default it works with tiny 512byte data blocks, which obviously takes FOREVER.

While researching it I come across another tool that bids itself as a simpler tool for migrating partitions called "ddrescue". I do a quick download, compile and run, and sure enough it's using the same block size. Sure enough, there's a handy little option called "--block-size", or just "-b" for short, that lets you tell it to use larger blocks of data at a time. A quick "-b 4096" later and the transfer speed jumped to ~5KB. Good enough, though it still took six hours.

After the six hours I now had a drive that seemed to all be there, but it only said it was 145gb and my efforts to resize it with Disk Utility just gave a wonderfully error that says "Error with partition: MediaKit reports partition (map) too small".

Back to the drawing board.

I then thought "maybe I have to copy just the partition instead of the entire drive. Six hours later... and I was left with basically the same thing - Disk Utility said that the entire drive was in one large 465gb partition, but Finder said it was only 145gb.

Back to the drawing board. Again.

And back to Disk Utility.

This time around I deleted the existing partition first so that the 500gb drive was completely blank. I then set the Rescue action to erase the destination. Four hours later it had copied all of the data, another two hours later and it had verified the data.

Golden. Or so I thought.

I now have a single, 465gb partition that shows up in Finder and Disk Utility. The only problem is that Disk Utility says that the drive itself has no partitions! While I'm stumped, I think I'm going to count my blessings, just deal with it - TimeMachine works again, and if I find a fix I'll post an update.