Access my all Time Machine history (since 2015) from my old Mac on my new MacBook

Question

Access my all Time Machine history (since 2015) from my old Mac on my new MacBook

Hi,

I bought a new MacBook (less storage) than my old Mac.

I got everything backed up with Time Machine (since 2015) and I migrate my data from old Mac to New MacBook using Migration Assistant (From a Time Machine Backup option).

I would like Time Machine on my new Macbook access old backups from my old Mac, I want it inherit Time Machine Backups.

But when I open Time Machine on my new MacBook with my old-Mac-backup-drive, I can only see backup from Today.

Is there a way to make my new MacBook inherit this backup history?

Old Mac Time Machine print screen:

New MacBook Time Machine print screen:

I read about an "Inherit backup history" option, but I cannot find this in MacOS Mojave.

MacBook Air 13", macOS 10.14

Posted on Jul 10, 2019 9:10 PM

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Answer 1

Tesserax

Level 10

160,164 points

Jul 14, 2019 8:26 PM in response to felipecrescencio

I believe the issue is caused by you creating a new user account, from scratch, with the same username as your old Mac. You should have just created the initial administrator account. Then use the Migration Assistant app on your new Mac to migrate your "old" user accounts to the new Mac.

At this point, you may want to use Recovery Mode to completely erase, and then, reinstall a "clean" copy of macOS. Then reboot and start the initial setup process again. This time be sure to select the Time Machine backup of the old Mac. It should offer you the option to inherit the backups.

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Answer 2

Jul 14, 2019 2:03 PM in response to Tesserax

I wasn't asked for inherit the backups.

I almost solved my problem following the steps from this medium link, it is very similar to the Ask Different link above.

More details about my case:

-At old Mac I had the following users:

--aline (my wife) - Home user dir: /Users/aline

--felipecrescencio (me) - Home user dir: /Users/felipecrescencio

-At new MacBook I created:

--felipe (me - new user from scratch) - Home user dir: /Users/felipe

--aline (my wife - restored with Migration Assistant) - Home user dir: /Users/aline

--felipecrescencio (me - old user restored with Migration Assistant) - Home user dir: /Users/felipecrescencio

After following medium link instructions:

-My wife's user (aline) worked 100%, she was able to access old backups from time machine;

-My old user (felipecrescencio) is not working, I restored it just to access old backups. I am able to access old backups from time machine, but I am not able to access the files, they look like restricted (print below).

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Answer 3

Tesserax

Level 10

160,164 points

Jul 10, 2019 9:48 PM in response to felipecrescencio

When you ran Migration Assistant on your new Mac and selected a Time Machine backup to transfer the data from your old Mac, did it not prompt you if you want to inherit the backups?

See if any of the following articles can help:

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Access my all Time Machine history (since 2015) from my old Mac on my new MacBook

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