I've been keeping Time Machine backups for a Snow Leopard MBP and a Lion rMBP on the same USB drive, which was working fine, but physically switching the drive back and forth was getting tiresome, especially since I could only run tmutil when it was on the Lion rMBP, so I thought I would try sharing the drive over ethernet.
Time Machine on the Snow Leopard MBP seemed happy enough to use the afp mounted volume from the rMBP for backups, but when it started, it wanted to use the Backups.backupdb/*rMBP directory instead of the Backups.backupdb/*MBP directory.
This wasn't what I wanted, and the other option to create a completely new backup set would not work since there was no longer enough space on the drive for another full backup.
So I thought I would go back to the tried and true method of physically moving the drive.
But now when I plugged the drive into the Snow Leopard MBP, Time Machine created a new .sparsebundle and tried to do a full backup anyway, which failed for lack of space.
That was frustrating, but I thought I still might be able to sacrifice enough incrementals to make room for a new full, so I moved the drive back to the Lion rMBP so I could tmutil delete a few things from Backups.backupdb/*MBP while Time Machine was doing its usual Backups.backupdb/*rMBP backups.
But now when Time Machine started on the Lion rMBP, it created a .sparsebundle and tried to do a full backup.
Making enough space for new full backups of both machines would mean deleting more old backups than I was willing to do.
So I've been trying to reconnect Time Machine to the old backup sets.
tmutil machinedirectory
tmutil listbackup
tmutil latestbackup
all seem to see the same old backup sets that they always did,
but
tmutil startbackup
keeps wanting to do a new full backup
tmutil inheritbackup /Volume/*/Backups.backupdb/*rMBP gives no error, but tmutil associatedisk / /Volume/*/Backups.backupdb/*rMBP
says "Not a snapshot volume"
Enter Time Machine still shows shows the old backups, and tmutil compare "`tmutil latestbackup`" finds only the changes I want to be incrementally backed up, but I can't get it do do an incremental backup rather than a full backup.
How can I restore the old incremental backup behavior or get associatedisk to recognize the old snapshot volume as a snapshotvolume?
And is there any hope of getting Time Machine backups working again om the Sow Leopard MBP that doesn't even have tmutil?
Time Machine on the Snow Leopard MBP seemed happy enough to use the afp mounted volume from the rMBP for backups, but when it started, it wanted to use the Backups.backupdb/*rMBP directory instead of the Backups.backupdb/*MBP directory.
This wasn't what I wanted, and the other option to create a completely new backup set would not work since there was no longer enough space on the drive for another full backup.
So I thought I would go back to the tried and true method of physically moving the drive.
But now when I plugged the drive into the Snow Leopard MBP, Time Machine created a new .sparsebundle and tried to do a full backup anyway, which failed for lack of space.
That was frustrating, but I thought I still might be able to sacrifice enough incrementals to make room for a new full, so I moved the drive back to the Lion rMBP so I could tmutil delete a few things from Backups.backupdb/*MBP while Time Machine was doing its usual Backups.backupdb/*rMBP backups.
But now when Time Machine started on the Lion rMBP, it created a .sparsebundle and tried to do a full backup.
Making enough space for new full backups of both machines would mean deleting more old backups than I was willing to do.
So I've been trying to reconnect Time Machine to the old backup sets.
tmutil machinedirectory
tmutil listbackup
tmutil latestbackup
all seem to see the same old backup sets that they always did,
but
tmutil startbackup
keeps wanting to do a new full backup
tmutil inheritbackup /Volume/*/Backups.backupdb/*rMBP gives no error, but tmutil associatedisk / /Volume/*/Backups.backupdb/*rMBP
says "Not a snapshot volume"
Enter Time Machine still shows shows the old backups, and tmutil compare "`tmutil latestbackup`" finds only the changes I want to be incrementally backed up, but I can't get it do do an incremental backup rather than a full backup.
How can I restore the old incremental backup behavior or get associatedisk to recognize the old snapshot volume as a snapshotvolume?
And is there any hope of getting Time Machine backups working again om the Sow Leopard MBP that doesn't even have tmutil?
Last edited: