Possible to merge TM backups with new Time Capsule

olisones said:

Hi all.

I'm about to take delivery of a new Time Capsule, and wondered whether it is possible to merge the time machine backups I have from a previous external hdd to the new TC? I would rather not start a new back up as I will be transferring data from the TM backup to my new rMBP.

Any ideas?

Cheers!

Click to expand...

On your current external drive in the root directory you'll find a folder named after your current Mac. Simply copy that to your new external drive or Time Capsule. Then disconnect the old external drive (don't delete anything just yet) and go into Time Machine options and tell it to use the Time Capsule. It should recognise that the current machine's backups are already there and it will simply continue. This definitely works when transferring your TM backup from one external drive to another so I see no reason why it should not work with a Time Capsule.

You should also be able to use the alt menu (hold down alt and click on the TM icon on the top right) to verify the backup as well afterwards to make sure nothing has gone wrong. I recall that the verify backup only works when you're backing up to a Time Capsule.

I believe that just copying the backup folder from the external HD to the TC will not work, because the TC backups are kept in a special "sparse bundle" file with the extension ".sparsebundle". I don't know why there's this difference.

Maybe this will answer your question, though:
http://pondini.org/TM/18.html

(He's got a lot of good TM and TC info on that site.)

Brian33 said:

I believe that just copying the backup folder from the external HD to the TC will not work, because the TC backups are kept in a special "sparse bundle" file with the extension ".sparsebundle". I don't know why there's this difference.

Maybe this will answer your question, though:
http://pondini.org/TM/18.html

(He's got a lot of good TM and TC info on that site.)

Click to expand...

Yes, but if you copy that particular sparse bundle, everything works just fine on external drives.