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I created a new Time Machine volume under APFS. I want to preserve my older backups of the same system that are on an HFS+ drive; that is, I'd like to copy over that data to the APFS Time Machine volume.

In searching around, it's apparent that Apple has made this difficult to accomplish. My first guess is there are ACLs involved.

My prior attempt at converting the HFS+ volume to APFS never succeeded; I gave up on that.

Is there a way to copy HFS+ Time Machine data to an APFS volume?

Forrest
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    It's not the ACLs, it's the hard links that are the problem. Time Machine on HFS is very much dependant on hard links. APFS cannot use them at all. The *only* way to ever properly copy a TM volume, even like to like, is using Finder. I'd suggest trying that & see what happens, whether it auto-magically converts one to the other - but be prepared for disappointment. [I've never tried it, but judging by how cussed TM usually is, I don't hold high hopes.] – Tetsujin Nov 10 '21 at 15:08
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    @Tetsujin It's even worse than that, because Time Machine on APFS uses volume snapshots to get the same effect it got with hard links on HFS+. But snapshots work quite a bit differently, and aren't well documented or supported (outside the few use cases Apple uses them for). So until & unless Apple provides a format converter, I'm pretty sure it's impossible to go from one format to the other. – Gordon Davisson Nov 10 '21 at 19:30
  • @GordonDavisson -ah, OK, right. Glad for your insight. I didn't think it was going to be simple. Thanks for the confirmation. – Tetsujin Nov 10 '21 at 19:38
  • Thank you for your feedback. It appears that, at the moment, my only choice is to hold on to this external HFS+ drive and move on with a new TM/apfs volume. FWIW, MacOS's Disk Utility does have a convert option, but it never worked on this drive, so I gave up. Could be due to the sheer volume of data and the tree of same under the BackupsDB. – Forrest Nov 11 '21 at 18:02

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