Mac – Copy a Time Machine “backup” from the TimeCapsule to a HD

time-capsuletime-machine

I'm reading this, but I'm concerned about one point.

In the Check the format section, it says the drive has to be Journaled HFS+ and have a GPT map. My drive is AppleAPFSMedia and the map is Unknown. My drive also has Ignore Ownership turned ON.

I do not want to back up to this drive, I simply want to use it one time during Migration Assistant as opposed to pulling things over Ethernet. I will not do any future backups to it.

Does anyone know for sure what the deal is here?

Best Answer

The document Transfer Time Machine backup ups from one disk to another is correct. You can't copy a Time Machine backup to your APFS drive. If the drive does not have important data you can erase it exactly as described in the Apple article and copy your Time Machine backup.

But, I don't see any benefit in that for you. Copying ahead of time will not be quick as the complete set of backups must be copied. Migration Assistant will only bring across the data requested (typically from your most recent backup) and will be quicker.