How to copy Mac Time Machine from on drive to another

I am trying to copy a Mac Time Machine folder from one external hard drive to another. The folder I want to copy is about 507Gb and, as it is a Time Machine folder, has a lot of symlinks, as many of the snapshots are very similar between subsequent saved versions. I have tried a bunch of different ways, with no success so far, i.e. the output folder was not the same size as the original in any of the cases. The old drive is not encrypted and the new one is, so I don’t think I can use Time Machine size explodes when copied to new drive.

Does anybody know a tried and verified way to move over such a folder? I am looking for a newer guide that will work with Catalina, as many of the questions I found on this topic are quite old.

What failed so far:

• Using the GUI to copy the folder - failed after copying only part of the first snapshot.

• Stopped it as it was still copying after generating 2.5TB form a 507Gb original.

sudo cp -r /Volumes/OldDrive/Backups.backupdb /Volumes/NewDrive/Backups.backupdb

• Turned a 507Gb original into a copy larger than 1.5Tb, which could be successfully used as a Time Machine folder afterwards.

sudo cp -rd /Volumes/OldDrive/Backups.backupdb /Volumes/NewDrive/Backups.backupdb

Turned the 507GB original into a 4.07 Gb folder. Output below.

sudo rsync -vaE --progress /Volumes/OldDrive/Backups.backupdb /Volumes/NewDrive

27052792 files to consider
…
…
rsync: chown "/Volumes/NewDrive/Backups.backupdb/MacBook Pro/2020-02-09-193924.inProgress/D97F0CA2-D94A-4FB5-95AE-CFE787459479/Macintosh HD/usr" failed: Operation not permitted (1)
rsync: failed to set times on "/Volumes/NewDrive/Backups.backupdb/MacBook Pro/2020-02-09-193924.inProgress/D97F0CA2-D94A-4FB5-95AE-CFE787459479/Recovery/D8F1E88B-698A-47EF-8F83-571DC7E2E01D": Operation not permitted (1)
sent 2324518286148 bytes  received 543151526 bytes  23051107.05 bytes/sec
total size is 2315718923016  speedup is 1.00
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at /AppleInternal/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/rsync/rsync-54.120.1/rsync/main.c(996) [sender=2.6.9]

Finder knows how to do this, almost nothing else does.

Hard links &/or permissions are the downfall usually.
Don't attempt to manually trim it as part of the copy process, just copy the whole lot. If you need to trim by size or date, do it separately.

Apple guide on copying - Transfer Time Machine backups from one backup disk to another

In brief:
Format HFS+
Set correct permissions system rw wheel rw everyone r
Turn off Time Machine
Drag the entire Backups.backupdb folder to the new drive.

Ask Different guide on trimming for size - Remove unnecessary backups from TimeMachine to get space