Doing a straight mirror of a TimeMachine backup from a 2TB Lacie external to a 4TB WD easystore.
Why would the scan find more than double the amount of files than the original disk can actually store?
Finder view
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Time Machine backups are weird. You will probably need to exclude some hidden folders. I had a recent drive that had a 'HFS+ private directory" that contained versioning history that expanded to great sizes like you see. Can you at least run the compare and see where the bulk of the size it from the window in the bottom-left of FFS?
Thanks for the reply xCSxXenon.
The drive with the TimeMachine backup I was trying to move was being used for two machines. So what I did on a second attempt was to only select one of the sub-folders under the backupdb. The original drive space was only 1TB and the scan showed 2.6TB to be placed on the target drive.
I let it run for a bit and then stopped it to see what was actually written to the target drive. Surprisingly the hidden folders were created along with some of the hidden files.
My concern is that the new target drive will not be in a state where TimeMachine can pick up where it left off making this whole effort a waste of time.
There is definitely something quirky regarding the structure of the TimeMachine backups. My first attempt to use a straight file copy with Finder ultimately attempted to copy more information to the target drive than was on the original disk.
You would be correct. Transferring Time Machine backups is finicky. Even 'Carbon Copy Cloner' a really good data migration tool for Mac, can't correctly move the backups and just skip it all together. You can manually copy them and Mac OS will be able to interpret them correctly. You could move all the data otherwise, then create a Time Machine backup on the new external, if the machine is still up and running that is.
