can you merge time machine backups?

[Anarchy99]

I have a lot of external HDs of various sizes some with time machine backups of my primary machine.

in a effort to get my life less cluttered I have recently bought a Drobo with 2x8tb drives I plan on deleting duplicated files, catagorizing etc. and then shucking the largest drives to fill the remaining spots in the drobo till i get all these externals off my desk and all my data in one location

regular files are easy just time consuming, the one thing i cant figure out is how i can merge all my time machine histories on to one drive (or preferably resizable disk image)
so it can live on the drobo with the rest of my digital clutter.

thanks

 

[Mikael H]

Duckduckgo says it may be possible:
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/6044/merge-time-machine-backup

I guess what you can try to do is to test the method described in the link to a new target (your shiny 8TB drives in the Drobo), and then attempt to restore a few files from the merged version of each of your original backup targets. This would at least partially check that the data migration didn't screw anything up for you.
You probably win very little in terms of disk space compared to simply copying the various sparse bundles and storing them separately on the Drobo.