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l008com · Jul 26, 2011, 01:34 PM

I have a unique situation, which is requiring me to move a time machine backup to another drive, but I can't fund anyway to do it (google just finds 100 other forum threads of people trying and failing).

This is the situation: My home server has a "backup" hard drive. It has one local backup on it (of itself) and then 4 disk image backups from other Macs on my network all backing up to the same drive. I upgraded my server (not to Lion), but I forgot to rescue a few things, including my MySQL data.

So my plan is to simply do a pre-upgrade restore of my server to a firewire drive, boot it, export my SQL data, and then just re-import it into the new server. Sounds simple.

BUUUUUUUT.
When I boot up a Mac off an OS X install disc, and try to restore from my time machine, it only sees the network backups on my time machine drive. I'm assuming that to see a "local" backup (that's not a disk image), the drive has to BE local.

So what I need to do is move/copy the local backup on my server's backup drive, to another drive that I can plug in locally to the computer that I'm using for this procedure.
The only think I've read that works, is doing a restore with Disk Utility. But this won't work for me because Restores copy everything, and I don't have enough space for all those other backups that are also on this drive.
I originally intended to use Carbon Copy Cloner to do this, but it won't even show the .backupdb folder (my guess is it purposely hides it since it's not able to copy it properly.

So I'm open to suggestions that don't involve taking down my server. And in the meantime, I'm going to try to convert the local backup folder to a disk image with disk utility, to make it portable. I suspect this isn't going to work but it's worth a shot I guess. I only need to access this backup, I'm not planning on continuing it's use as my server's backup.

Waragainstsleep · Jul 26, 2011, 05:53 PM

Have you tried installing the OS on the firewire drive and then migrating from a TM backup?
If you give the FW boot drive the same name as the server, then select a blank disk as a TM backup volume, then copy the old backup into its Backups.backupdb folder, does that work?

Is there any reason you can't just go into the TM backup manually and retrieve your SQL data?

l008com · Jul 26, 2011, 05:57 PM

I can't migrate from the TM disk for the same reason I can't restore from it. When it's connected over the network, it only sees the network backups on there. The disk needs to be local for TM to see the backupsdb folder. Which is why I'm trying to move the backup to another disk. The problem is you can't move a TM backup.

CharlesS · Jul 26, 2011, 06:55 PM

Drag the Backups.backupdb folder using the Finder. I know it sounds weird, but I've tried every method, including Disk Utility and cloning software, and it's the only thing that works, including preserving all the hard links. Just make sure the Backups.backupdb folder is the only thing in the selection when you drag it over - if you include other items in the copy, you'll get an error box about the selection containing both backup and non-backup items (which seems to indicate that the Finder uses special logic for this case and is this the most likely tool to do the job properly).

l008com · Jul 26, 2011, 07:01 PM

Ok onces my image stops (and fails), I'll try just a simple basic drag.

l008com · Jul 27, 2011, 12:35 PM

Wow look at that. You can simply drag the backup folder to a new drive right in the Finder. You read all over the web that this doesn't work. I wonder if older versions of OS X, like 10.5, could not do this. I did it with 10.6.8 and it worked fine.