Copying backup files between external hard drives

shellypwatx

Registered
I need some help with an error I'm getting trying to transfer my Time Machine backup files from one external hard drive to a new one. It's saying that the new one doesn't have "ownership enabled". I'm just trying to copy the Backups.backupdb folder to the new one and then I'll set that new one as the default Time Machine backup location.

THANKS IN ADVANCE!

View attachment 8376
 
Try doing a Get Info of the drive in question, (Cmd+I)
down at the bottom, is there a checkbox for "Ignore Ownership of this drive)?
If so, then try enabling it and then retry your copy.
 
Thanks for the reply jbarley! Ya, that was where my woes started actually. The current/original drive doesn't show that option but the new drive I'm trying to transfer them to does.

Attaching a screenshot of the Get Info from the current one that I'm trying to get the info from.View attachment 8377
 
I think the problem I'm having is similar. I have two sets of backups on an external Western Digital 1TB drive. The first set is from my previous MBP of about a year ago that crashed while under warranty and was replaced. My external disk is now filling up and starting to overwrite backups, but since the new machine was set up by the Genius Bar when it was replaced, it was named something other than the previous machine, so Time Machine is overwriting more recent backups (the second set) rather than the ones from 2 years ago (the first set).

I'd like to move the first set to another offline disk I have (but rarely use) so that Time Machine will stop overwriting the more current data until I can get another backup disk.

All my attempts at trying to copy the data from the one disk to the other have failed so far (cryptic messages indicating that I'm not allowed to perform the copy function).

Can anyone advise how to get around this?

Thanks,

Bowjest
 
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