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rockjamesroll

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 12, 2009
2
0
Hello everyone. I am new to the forums and pretty new to apple machines as well. I have a question and I hope somebody here could help shed some light:

I have an external HD that I use for Time Machine backups for my Macbook. I have installed Mac OS X on this same external HD as a bootable drive in case something happens to my internal HD. I just bought a new HD and I want to do 2 things:

1) Move over Backups.backupdb folder which contains my Time Machine backups from old hard drive to new hard drive. I know the recommended method would be to clone the old HD using "restore" in Disk Utility. Now my problem is the old HD has OS X installed which I do not want to copy over to the new HD. Is there a way to remove the OS X install files? The reason being is item number 2 below.

2) After I've moved the Time Machine backups to the new HD (without the OSX files), I want to be able to "convert" Backups.backupdb which was produced by Time Machine through a direct USB connection to a "sparsebundle" file (which would have been produced by Time Machine if I used the wireless backup from the start). I am not sure how I could achieve this, probably through another cloning method. The reason I'd like to "convert" to a sparsebundle is because I have a Mac Mini set up as an HTPC and I am thinking I can just share a hard drive over the network connected to the Mac Mini and do wireless backups of my MacBook via Time Machine. I do not want to lose my old backups.

Does this sound achievable? Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
 
Okay I've found some info regarding creating a sparsebundle and then copying the contents of backups into that file. Does anyone know how to get rid of OS X from an external HD? Is it a matter of deleting a bunch of files? Direct copying of the backups files to the new HD doesn't work.
 
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