Transferring a Time Machine backup to a larger disk can be challenging, as a simple file copy operation in the Finder does not work.
The entire volume has to be transferred in one piece, sector by sector. Disk Utility can usually do this by creating an interim image, but that requires an even larger disk as a temporary storage medium.
This hint is a bit more low level, but once understood, pretty simple: Copy all volume blocks to the new drive, then adjust the volume's size to match the new, larger, partition. That's it. In this article I describe how I moved my entire Time Machine backup from one internal disk to another, larger, one. This technique keeps the backup volume intact so that TM keeps using it without the need to start over by losing all previous backups. In my case, I had the volume on a mirrored RAID set, and move it to another, larger, mirrored RAID set - so this works, too. ...
The entire volume has to be transferred in one piece, sector by sector. Disk Utility can usually do this by creating an interim image, but that requires an even larger disk as a temporary storage medium.
This hint is a bit more low level, but once understood, pretty simple: Copy all volume blocks to the new drive, then adjust the volume's size to match the new, larger, partition. That's it. In this article I describe how I moved my entire Time Machine backup from one internal disk to another, larger, one. This technique keeps the backup volume intact so that TM keeps using it without the need to start over by losing all previous backups. In my case, I had the volume on a mirrored RAID set, and move it to another, larger, mirrored RAID set - so this works, too. ...