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My Time Machine has stopped working with Catalina. The drive still shows all 32 backups - see image - so they are not lost.
However, if I reformat the drive and start again I will lose the backups.
Can I copy all the backups to another drive, reformat the TM drive, do a backup and then copy all the pre-existing old backups into the drive to the appropriate folder? Will all the old backups be recognised with the new start?
iMac, macOS 10.13
Unless I am missing something with the "fully"?
It would seem so. I didn't say anything about older backups. They are not lost in any way whatsoever. You saw them for yourself and even drew attention to that fact.
The only unresolved question is why TM apparently stopped working, which you can pursue if you wish. Start with Time Machine troubleshooting on Mac.
Until you resolve that problem though, you're not backing up. Get another drive, add it to TM, then you'll be in position to fix whatever's wrong with the first one.
Unless I am missing something with the "fully"?
It would seem so. I didn't say anything about older backups. They are not lost in any way whatsoever. You saw them for yourself and even drew attention to that fact.
The only unresolved question is why TM apparently stopped working, which you can pursue if you wish. Start with Time Machine troubleshooting on Mac.
Until you resolve that problem though, you're not backing up. Get another drive, add it to TM, then you'll be in position to fix whatever's wrong with the first one.
You cannot copy them but you can clone the backup drive to another drive of equal capacity using Disk Utility. You can then reformat the old backup drive and re-use it for Time Machine backups.
Understand, the Catalina Time Machine is not fully compatible with the Time Machine from older macOS versions. Catalina backups should not be mixed with older backups.
Yes, but I'd address the cause regardless of whatever you choose to do. Whatever caused TM to stop working needs to be addressed lest the transferred backups inherit the problem.
Since you already have another drive simply add it to Time Machine and let it continue to back up. That way, you might isolate the cause to the backup drive or its source volume. You can add as many backup drives as you wish. Eventually, you will accumulate enough backups to reformat the (potentially) problematic one.
That is all very well, but it appears that the older backups, not being "fully" compatible with Catalina, are in effect lost; this rather negates the whole point of having backups in the first place! Unless I am missing something with the "fully"?
time machine copying backups to a new TM drive
