Note that things work a little differently for Time Machine backups over a local network because of how network drives store things. The process will most likely take a few hours, so plug your laptop into the outlet and consider keeping your Mac awake to make sure this gets done. Head to the old drive and you’ll see a folder called “backups.backupd.”ĭrag this entire folder over to your new drive.

Now we can copy our files over from the old Time Machine backup to our new one. You can potentially partition your Time Machine drive if you want both backups and other files on the same drive.Ĭlick “Erase” when you’re ready and the drive will be reformatted.As of this writing, APFS drives cannot be used as Time Machine destinations, so do not format the drive as APFS.If you want to encrypt your Time Machine backup use MacOS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted) instead it’s going to be a lot faster than encrypting your backup later on.Write the drive as “MacOS Extended (Journaled)” using the “GUID Partition Table”. Open Disk Utility with Spotlight, or by heading to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility in the Finder.Ĭlick your new hard drive in the left panel, then click “Erase.” Make sure you’re not erasing your old Time Machine drive before doing anything. It’s likely not formatted properly, so we need to use Disk Utility to get things just right. Go ahead and plug in your new hard drive. Step Two: Connect and Format Your New Drive It will slow you down and potentially introduce conflicts.ĭone? Good, let’s keep going. The reason is simple: you don’t want a new backup starting while you’re migrating your files.

Backup external hard drive time machine