Hi,

Just recently a cable for my external hard drive broke (covered by warranty but they have to send away the whole apparatus). Conveniently I have the same external HD at work so I could borrow a functioning cable to transfer my files. What is the best way to go about transferring the Time Machine data to my new external HD? I won't receive it until after I hand over the old one, which means I need to put the data in some intermediate space for a bit. I would really appreciate any guidance... I have this not-so-wonderful knack for breaking anything electronic just by looking at it.

Cheers,
Northern

just back up to the new TM drive. unless you have critical data that you have to retrieve from the old back up? if so, do it now, and so a fresh back up.

Time Machine backups are non-transferrable as far as I know. If you move the backup from one drive to another, TM will not use it and will start all over again from scratch.

According to the Shirt Pocket Web site, you can clone Time Machine backups to a different drive.

SuperDuper!

Keyword: Clone. (Super Duper, Disk Utility, etc.)

If you manually drop and drag TM backup folders, this will not work.