Copying Time Machine backup, destination takes more than original size, are hardlinks being expanded?

Question

I'm copying the backup folder of Time Machine, but it's taking too long, the backup is 90GB and the copy already reports 160GB and there's 60% to go yet, so I suspect it's copying hardlinks as different "solid" versions of the files. (which would take up much more space than I have avaible, which is 300GB)

I tried making a partition of 120 GB to fit it by restoring from disk utility, but it said there wasn't enough space.

Also tried to restore to a sparse bundle on a partition with 300GB free, but didn't work either.

Is there a better or smarter way of doing this within my 300GB space?

edit & PS: The only alternative if this doesn't work is keeping only the last backup and saying bye bye to the older ones.

PS 2: Time Machine just recognized the old Backup folder and resumed from it even when the OS was freshly re-installed.