How to move Photos Library and associated iPhotos Library to another drive without breaking links

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I wish to move my Photos Library to a secondary drive, both formatted with APFS. I still have the iPhotos Library from where the pictures were imported.

I'm concerned that when moving the Photos and the iPhotos libraries to a new drive the shared masters will be duplicated and increase storage usage.

Is there a way I can move both libraries and preserve the link between them?

Best Answer

So, no definitive answer.

I had copied my iPhotos, Aperture and Photos libraries to the new drive using Finder, but I was worried I was using unnecessary space. I did a new copy using rsync as follows:

rsync -azH --progress Aperture\ Library.migratedaplibrary iPhoto\ Library.migratedphotolibrary Photos\ Library\ \(Aperture\).photoslibrary Photos\ Library\ \(iPhoto\).photoslibrary /Volumes/Secondary\ SSHD/Users/me/Pictures

Now I'm sure I'm using too much space. :-)

This command should preserve hard links from the source in the destination, but as @Tetsujin commented on the question APFS doesn't support hard links and I don't think it would use copy on write with files in different media (what would happen if I ejected the media?).

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