Hi

I have a client who wants to move her backups from a HFS case sensitive external to a non-case sensitive external. When I recover these files on R-Studio (and MacDrive) not all files copy over which is not unusual with a TimeMachine backup. When I put the drive on a Mac and try to clone the backups I get a message saying the drive is the wrong format. Anyone know of a way to do this?

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HDD, SSD, Flash and RAID Data Recovery
Founder of The Data Recovery Professionals Group

The only way I know how to move Time Machine backups from one drive to another is to clone the drive or use Mac OS Disk Utility to copy the partition to another HFs+ formatted partition.

I just googled and found this open source app http://sourceforge.net/projects/hfsconverter/files/ Try it on the clone and let us know how you make out.

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Luke
Recovery Force Donor Inventory: 5,000+ Fully Cataloged HDDs & Growing

Hey Luke

You can't clone a CS formatted drive to a NCS formatted drive unfortunately. I downloaded the app, but couldn't work out how to use it. Its Unix based and I have no experience of that. However I did find iPartition which can change CS formats to NCS formats and it worked well. I was then able to copy the backup files.

Thanks for the help.

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HDD, SSD, Flash and RAID Data Recovery
Founder of The Data Recovery Professionals Group

Cloning a drive is more than just copying files, it's sector level (meaning that even the partition table and filesystem are copied). So how the target drive is currently formatted is completely irrelevant. It could be Windows formatted for that matter. If you're trying to copy to a drive already full of other data though there is no way. You'll have to copy the data off, clone the backip drive to it, and then copy the other data back to it.

If you want to clone it on a Mac, Data Rescue 3 or 4 can do it (for a price) you just have to set it to a sector level copy. Or you can learn to use ddrescue in Linux as a free alternative and just clone the drive.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

I am no expert on Case Sensitive formats (as you can tell), but from everything I have read it is not that simple. In CS formats folders and files can have the same names, one with capitals one without. Just cloning the data and having files with the same names does cause issues. This is even more complicated by the fact these files are Time Machine backup files and not standard files. I will try what you have suggested as an experiment and report back, but I am pretty sure its not possible to put the TM files on a Windows formatted drive.... unless I am missing something??

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HDD, SSD, Flash and RAID Data Recovery
Founder of The Data Recovery Professionals Group

Food for thought: why aim for a file extraction on a TM volume?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts