Hi,
I have a 5 years long backup history in an external drive. I have changed my mac book pro, I don't want to migrate stuff which i instead selectively reinstalled.
I'd like to continue to do my back up from the new mac book pro in the drive I used before to continue the backup history in there.
is this possible? how do I do that safely so I do not risk
- to loose my backups
- to loose a way to access them (e.g. when I will get rid of the old mac)
thanks a lot
Pietro
There is a way to force the backup history to be inherited, but I consider it too complicated for most users to carry out, and it won't do any good if you've already started using Time Machine with the new setup. If you're familiar with the shell and want to try it, search the tmutil(8) manual page for the terms "inheritbackup" and "associatedisk."
Otherwise I suggest you set the backup drive aside and stop using it until you're sure you'll no longer need the data. Then erase it and start over. Meanwhile, start a new backup on another drive. You need more than one backup to be safe anyway.
Dear Linc, thank you for your reply! I don't want to set aside my drive and five years of regular backups. I have the most important files also somewhere else but that is not the point. I want to be able in 10 years to look at what I was working on in September 2010. I have not started at all using time machine on the new macbook pro: does that help? I hesitated because of this question so timemachine in the new setup is not configured at all. I would like my first backup here to be the next in the series of those old backups. I haven't even plugged in the old drive with the backups because I was afraid it would write over them to make the new backup of this machine. Please, if there is a humanly accessible way to do this, it would be very nice. Thank you very much
Time Machine is a backup tool, not an archiving tool. It gives you a window of time in which to recover data that has been lost from the backup sources. You can't rely on it to preserve files that you want to keep indefinitely. Any such files must be backed up along with the rest of your original data. Files that you delete from the source volume(s) will eventually be deleted from the backups, after a variable delay that depends on your usage pattern and the size of the backup volume.
If you insist on using the backup drive as an archive, then you must stop using it as a backup destination.
Dear Linc Davis,
thanks for the clarification.
So it is my fault. I understand. Nevertheless I would like to continue with my wrong practice, because that is the reason I have done it for all this time although it conflicts with the intentions of the producers. I have repeatedly increased the space available so that older backups would not be deleted. I hope I have not hurt anybody with my backup/archive practice, and I would indeed like to be able to keep access to my backups from this new machine.
Let me ask my fallback question then: if I plug in the drive with the old backups in this new machine, will I be able to see those backups and restore files?
Thanks a lot!
if I plug in the drive with the old backups in this new machine, will I be able to see those backups and restore files?
Yes, but if you continue to use the drive as a backup destination, the old snapshots will eventually be deleted. Some of them may be deleted immediately to make room for the next snapshot.
continue backup history
