How to duplicate an existing Time Machine backup and use both copies as TMs

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I have a Time Machine backup, and have bought an identical external drive, with the intention of running TM on both drives.

I know that I can just plug the new drive in and configure it as a TM target, but I have a significant amount of history in the backup that is no longer on the source system (due to disk space constraints). I'd like to start the redundant backup as a mirror of the original, so that the older weekly data is available from either TM. Ultimately, one of the disks will be at the office, the other at home. Anything else isn't really a satisfactory DR solution.

I've found any number of discussions about cloning TMs and moving TM from one disk to another, but not an answer to this question. Perhaps it's perfectly straightforward and I'm over-thinking it. But I don't want to have these disks chugging for hours copying data that isn't going to produce a second functional TM.

Thanks in advance.

Best Answer

The short answer to my question is "Yes, you can". The tricks involved are:

  1. Make sure the second disk is formatted identically to the first (ie if the first one uses Apple Partition Map or GUID Partition Table, the replica must be the same. Disk Utility reports inscrutable non-obvious errors otherwise.)
  2. Carbon Copy Cloner probably will work, but after it churned for 8 hours, only 8.5GB had been copied. Using Disk Utility, all 300GB was copied and verified in the same time. That's not to diss CCC, it's very good at what it does, but for some reason it was very slow for my case. Others say DU didn't work for them, so YMMV.
  3. At the finish, I had two identical disks. I renamed them both, and each was successfully recognised as a TM drive when plugged in, with its new name. I had to reset their Spotlight non-indexing status, but otherwise they worked exactly as they should.
  4. I ran a "Backup Now" on each (serially), and each reported and processed the same volume of data to be backed up. Both took exactly the same time to calculate the work required and perform it.
  5. The Time Machine dock item worked exactly as it should for both disks, showing the correct data from the just completed "Backup Now" job.
  6. The Preference Panel reports the timestamp of the last one done, irrespective of which drive was used.

So, I now have a workable swap-out setup for my backups, where one of the disks stays offsite with me and the other plugged into the server. Thanks everyone for taking an interest.

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