Will there ever be a fix for the "inherit backups" problem?

bobzillard wrote:

. . .

My own documents were mostly stored on an external drive, not on the previous computer itself. I would not have expected their backups to be tied to it but I did not see an option to inherit the backup history after setting up the new computer in that way.

How, exactly, did you set up the new Mac?

If you used Setup Assistant when it first started up (by far the best way), or Migration Assistant later on (can cause problems), when you did the first backup of the new Mac to the old backup location, you should have been asked if you want the new Mac to "inherit" the old backups, per #B5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

On occasion, that doesn't work. If it didn't, or if you used any other way to set up the new Mac, you may be able to do it manually, per #B6 in the same link.

Those will deal with the new Mac, and it's new internal (start-up) drive.

Assuming you're going to just connect the external HD to your new Mac, and continue to use it as before, you shouldn't have to do anything else. The backups of that drive are still on the same drive, and "inheriting" the old backups means they now look like they were done from the new Mac.

If you got a Mac with a larger drive, and are planning to move the data from the external to it, that's a whole different situation. When you combine two drives, the content you move is new to that drive, so will be backed-up again. You can still see and restore from the old backups of it, via the procedure in #E3 of the above link.

For some general info and considerations of backing-up multiple drives, see Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #32.

bobzillard wrote:

. . .

I wanted time to think so I switched the drive OFF (probably should have clicked DECIDE LATER).

Eeek! I hope you ejected it first? If not, that can corrupt your backups.

Then when I switched the drive back ON and started up Time Machine it said there was insufficient space and did not offer the "inherit backup history" option.

I've never tried disconnecting, but apparently it was taken as selecting the Create New Backup option.

After this, I tried to get the option again by repeating the migration and using the sudo tmutil commands in Terminal (as per your B6) but this produced error messages like:

"Unexpectedly found no machine directories for TIME_MACHINE during collision check"

If you saw that with tmutil inheritbackup, it sounds like you didn't drag the folder representing the old Mac to the Terminal window.

(That may have been my fault -- as I recall, while replacing some of those samples with clearer versions, I had one in the wrong place briefly. The text was right, just not the sample.)

"DOCUMENTS_DISK: Not a snapshot volume"

That also sounds like the wrong disk in the wrong place -- since that particular disk wasn't replaced, you didn't need to do anything with it anyway -- just the OSX volume.

"The backup OLD_MAC can't be inherited because it would conflict with NEW_MAC"

Now that's a new one. 😟 I've not seen it before. Sounds like it was either trying to connect both Macs to the same set of backups.

I decided to get a new drive for backups, move most of my data back onto the new larger internal drive and only then to start up Time Machine.

Good plan! 🙂

You can always see or restore from the old backups, via the Browse... option, per #E2 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

Pondini wrote:

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"The backup OLD_MAC can't be inherited because it would conflict with NEW_MAC"

Now that's a new one. 😟 I've not seen it before. Sounds like it was either trying to connect both Macs to the same set of backups.

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I had the same problem, with multiple computers represented in the Backups.backupdb folder. This happened becase the migrate_assistant did not migrate my backups, and I started a backup on my own before I knew about the tmutil commands. So my backup disk looked like this:

Backups.backkupDB

• OLD_MAC
• NEW_MAC

This caused the "OLD_MAC can't be inherited because it would conflict with NEW_MAC" exception because the inherit command wants to create NEW_MAC by itself.

I used the tmutil delete command to remove NEW_MAC, and then proceeded with the inherit and associate commands from Pondini's B6 page:

> sudo tmutil delete "/Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb/NEW_MAC/"

> sudo tmutil inheritbackup /Volumes/BackupTBmain/Backups.backupdb/OLD_MAC

> sudo tmutil associatedisk -a / /Volumes/BackupTBmain/Backups.backupdb/NEW_MAC/2012-10-10-204008/OLD_MAC-HD

-Tim

Tim Levin wrote:

. . .

This happened becase the migrate_assistant did not migrate my backups,

It's not documented anywhere I can find, but that appears to happen if you don't transfer Settings.

This caused the "OLD_MAC can't be inherited because it would conflict with NEW_MAC" exception because the inherit command wants to create NEW_MAC by itself.

Correct: you can change a Computer folder, but you can't merge two, or have two identical ones in the same backup set.

> sudo tmutil delete "/Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb/NEW_MAC/"

Very interesting -- I didn't realize you could delete a whole Computer folder that way; I thought you could only delete individual snapshots. Thanks!

I got here because I too am getting the dreaded "Unexpectedly found no machine directories for TIME_MACHINE during collision check" when trying to inherit my old backup.

I got a new mac and the machine name differs from the old. I was migrating from an iMac G5 to a new intel iMac. Since the cpu architectures differ - I decided that manually moving my data to the new machine was the best option which is undoubtedly part of the problem. Anyway, when I started time machine on the new system, I was not asked if I wanted to use the old backup. I quickly stopped the backup and found Pondini's guides (thanks for documenting things for us!)

Unfortunately, none of the options have worked for me. My original backups were filtered s.t. I was not backing up system files and libraries - pretty much just data in home directories was being backed up. I think that included <username>/Libraries too.

I suppose there is something in the original backup that is missing for it not to be recognized. I even tried to sudo mv the backup name to the new machine name but get an "Operation not permitted" error.

It certainly would be nice to get to my old backups since iTunes transfer also seemed to go haywire. The new iTunes decided that I didn't have an existing iTunes music library so it started a new one. Weird thing is, other users migrated in same way didn't experience this problem?

Kinda bummed the inherit command doesn't recognize the old backup. Seems like a rather important thing to be sure it doesn't fail. A perfectly good backup repository can't be migrated to new machine - that should not happen. I did use the "drag from finder technique" to make sure that the name is correct when using tmutil so that's not the issue.

If anyone has any other suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Message was edited by: John Harkins - to improve clarity

John Harkins wrote:

. . .

My original backups were filtered s.t. I was not backing up system files and libraries - pretty much just data in home directories was being backed up. I think that included <username>/Libraries too.

I suppose there is something in the original backup that is missing for it not to be recognized. I even tried to sudo mv the backup name to the new machine name but get an "Operation not permitted" error.

It may have have been different on Leopard (I don't recall testing that on Leopard), but I suspect it's the things you didn't back up. If you only exclude System files and applications (ie, /System and the standard Apple apps), Setup Assistant and Migration Assistant will recognize the backups and transfer the "other" apps and user accounts and data.

However, if you also excluded other things, especially the hidden private library, it may not. I suspect the critical items are wherever user accounts are stored -- without those, Time Machine can't associate a user account to it's home folder (yes, they normally have the same name, but they don't have to, and the UID seems to be associated with the account, not the home folder).

But you should be able to see and restore from the old backups via the Time Machine browser. Since they're from a different Mac, use the Browse Other Backup Disks option, per #E2 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting. You may also have to use the procedure in the green box of #E3 there.

It certainly would be nice to get to my old backups since iTunes transfer also seemed to go haywire. The new iTunes decided that I didn't have an existing iTunes music library so it started a new one. Weird thing is, other users migrated in same way didn't experience this problem?

Or, you should be able to copy that manually, by dragging & dropping via the Finder. But you may have permissions problems if the user account you're logged-on with isn't recognized as being the same as on the backups.

Hopefully it doesn't seem like I'm hijacking this thread. I've moved my TM drive to a Raspberry Pi, sharing it with AFP. Details at this thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5217752

I haven't migrated my actual system or anything, and I'm trying to resume the backups, but I'm getting 'found no machine directories'. Pondini, any ideas?

Thanks!

Since there's more info in the other thread, I'll answer there.

Usually not a good idea to scatter parts of the same problem over multiple threads. 😉